Made from real, guillotined unicorns!

You look like your morning could use a bit more than a vat of coffee and a nasty breakfast burrito.  Luckily, you tuned into The Nest, where every Monday we feature another up and at ’em tune that will help you face the world for another seven days!  And we’re doing it countdown style right now, halfway through our Top 30 Songs We Just Feel Like Playing countdown!  These are the songs that are too cool for even DJ Scratchy and her Dusty Vinyl Archive.  Now sit back and relax, and enjoy a musical experience that could have only come from the 1990’s…

#15. “The Distance” – Cake

A little over fifteen years ago, someone on ye olde message board I frequent who I used to trade a lot of back and forth banter with, dedicated a song called “Nugget” to me by this group I had never heard of called Cake.  I hated the song, and over the years made sure to bring up Cake every time I wanted to tease her about her questionable musical tastes.  For many years, and solely on the basis of one song I thought was stupid, the band Cake was a joke that epitomized all I didn’t like about 90’s music…

Oh, who’d have guessed you’d drag me out again, squirrel. I’ll laugh from up here when Merby slaps your ass…

Then in 2012, I grew tired of my current radio station when it dropped its “no repeat” format at the same time a new all 90’s station was coming on the air.  For the year or so it existed, it became my new regular… and much to my surprise I found a whole bevy of new songs I had never heard of before which had grown on me.  I was gobsmacked to find out that two of them were by that very band I used to so blindly ridicule… the one and only Cake.  While I love “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” (As well as “Never There,” which I picked up from the Mecca CD in 2013), my favorite, and one I adore enough to put in this countdown, is Cake’s 1996 breakout hit “The Distance”…

Cake’s signature style is all over this song… the blending of such varying formats of music like hip hop and mariachi, the monotoned singing of John McCrea, as well as the trumpet of Vince DiFiore that appeared in almost all of their songs.  When I think of what the mid 90’s sounded like, “The Distance” is the collage that best represents that era to me.

Your exotic musical instrument to be introduced to this week: The melodica.

The video is pretty awesome as well, featuring an extra from the set of Wall Street who apparently has enough of day trading and decides to just go all Forrest Gump and start running… where he meet all kinds of interesting furries who are cheering him on.

I’ll leave you with one more tidbit about this song.  One of the most common hidden meanings people try to inject into our favorite pop tunes is that they are really about masturbation.  Most artists deny this, and usually they’re justified in doing so.  Listen to “The Distance” again and pretend that it really is about wanking.  It works entirely too well….

Mr. Skunk doesn’t care. He’s just happy to get into a music video…

Like Cake, The Nest is going the distance in this countdown!  Be sure to come back next Monday for Song #14…