Prolonging the Magic

With Brown and Damiani’s departure, McCrea felt “free to experiment” with the next album, 1998’s Prolonging the Magic ; he wrote and produced every song. As a result of this experimentation, the album was noted as “loaded with spiced-up instrumentation, including a few new ingredients like the pedal steel guitar and musical saw thrown in for extra flavour”. McCrea stated that he deliberately “approached writing this record without the guitar as the central assumption of all life in the universe”. Music Week described it as an “inspired collection of leftfield rock”, while Thor Christensen of The Dallas Morning News said that it “brims with the same dry humor the Sacramento band displayed in past hits such as ‘The Distance’ and ‘Rock and Roll Lifestyle’: The leadoff track, ‘Satan Is My Motor’, puts a devilish new spin on the rock ‘n’ roll car-song tradition, while ‘When You Sleep’ revolves around the question of what your fingers do while the rest of the body snoozes”. Other reviewers were less complimentary, with Mike Pattenden in The Times writing that ” Prolonging the Magic suggests that [Cake] may well be destined to go down as one-hit wonders … While a handful stand out – the country waltz ‘Mexico’, ‘You Turn the Screws’ and ‘Hem of Your Garment’ – ‘Prolonging the Magic’ shows McRea and company to be little more than an above average bar-room act. Cake are surviving on songwriting crumbs”. The album peaked at number 33 on the Billboard 200 , was listed in The Columbian as the second best album of 1998, and eventually went platinum after shipping over 1 million units.