Greg Brown, Founding Cake Guitarist Who Wrote ‘The Distance,’ Has Died

The Sacramento, California band formed in 1991, with Brown on guitar alongside singer John McCrea, multi-instrumentalist Vince DiFiore, and others. While McCrea served as the main songwriter, Brown co-wrote tracks on Cake’s first two albums, 1994’s Motorcade of Generosity and 1996’s Fashion Nugget, and was the sole writer of Cake’s smash 1996 single “The Distance.”

“[McCrea] took to it right away, and I didn’t really understand what he saw in it so much,” Brown told Billboard of “The Distance” in 2021. “I liked the way it sounded and everything, but I thought [Fashion Nugget’s] ‘Frank Sinatra’ was a much stronger choice for the single. But the record label chose it and it worked out.”

However, following the tour in support of Fashion Nugget, Brown left Cake — “I would just say there was a lot of turmoil at the time, and I felt like leaving Cake would be a decision that would be good for my health,” he told Billboard — to pursue other musical endeavors, including his own band Deathray (with fellow former Cake member Victor Damiani on bass) as well as Homie, a short-lived side project of Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo; Brown plays on Homie’s lone release, the song “American Girls” from the soundtrack for 1998’s Meet the Deedles.

Following a pair of Deathray albums in the early 2000s, Brown reunited with Cake to play guitar on “Bound Away,” a song on the band’s 2011 album Showroom of Compassion.