CAKE singer-songwriter John McCrea didn’t start out as an environmentalist out to reforest the West Coast. His fascination with trees has roots in a plum tree he planted outside his old apartment in midtown Sacramento before the band was well-known. He just wanted the experience of planting a tree.

Then CAKE became successful, and McCrea eventually moved to a different apartment and forgot all about that tree. A decade later, he found himself walking through his old neighborhood and spotted the tree, which had grown from 2 to 25 feet tall, and it blew his mind.

“It also challenged my sense of time a little bit; it shook me, and it was a good shake. I thought everybody should have this experience of this weird cooperation with nature,” he says in a recent call from Portland, where he now lives.

Fast-forward to 2021, and CAKE is the public face of a campaign to reforest wildfire-ravaged areas in Southern California, Oregon and Washington. For One Tree Planted, the nonprofit spearheading this effort, it’s a hugely successful project that in the first 10 days met half its goal to plant 48,000 trees. For every dollar donated, one tree was reserved, and planting will soon begin, McCrea said.

The outspoken vocalist, now very much a tree-loving environmentalist, speaks like an ecologist when talking about reforestation.

“One of my favorite trees right now is the ponderosa pine. Unlike lodgepole pines or other pines, ponderosas can live 500 years; sometimes longer. So, they get giant,” he says of the trees that One Tree Planted will be planting. “And they’re super fire-resistant, so I think they’re a really good type of tree to plant in really flammable high desert forest locations. I plant a lot of ponderosas because I think they’re cool and appropriate for our hopefully only slightly dystopian future. They’re going to do better than some of the more flammable trees, as everything in the West dries out and tries to blow away.”

Over the last decade, CAKE started giving away trees at some of the band’s shows. That too, McCrea says, initially had less to do with environmentalism than the band’s aesthetic and attempt to break up the monotony of touring life.

The idea started as a way to simply include more nature in their everyday lives. Adding a tree on stage was a tactic to make performances feel less like a rock show.

“We initially railed against some of the more bulbous and self-indulgent aspects of rock culture. [But] we were ourselves trapped in it, having to tour and play shows, and sort of be in that same infrastructure,” he says. “It wasn’t what I signed up for. I was feeling alienated by the machinery of the music business. It didn’t feel that different than being a traveling salesman or a truck driver or something.”

If he had lots of money, he says, he’d cover each stage in houseplants. But the tree idea quickly morphed into one of fan engagement, where the band gifted a sapling to a fan, who would be in charge of planting it and taking pictures of it for the band’s website so others could watch it grow.

The One Tree Planted partnership, dubbed #CAKEforests, is a natural fit for CAKE. Within the first 10 days of the campaign that began in late April, money had been raised to plant more than 24,000 trees. They will be planted over 10.2 million acres in three regions heavily damaged by wildfires in 2020: 16,000 trees each in the Slater Fire in California, Canyon Mountain Fire Complex and Rail Fire in Oregon, and Washington’s Cougar Creek fire.

McCrea said he stumbled onto One Tree Planted.

“It’s a very well-rated organization that has a pretty simple goal of reforesting damaged areas,” he says. “Clearly, trees are going to be part of the solution—a lot of different solutions—to not lose our ecosystems, our biological world. There’s so many moving parts … and we co-evolved with trees. So, it’s one of those things we should probably do our utmost to protect.”

While McCrea does his best to stay informed about the wrongs that need righting in the U.S., reforestation is one of the more primal needs because so many other things depend on one of the biggest risks of climate change.

“It just sort of has to come first, in a way. You can argue about states’ rights after you have air to breathe, after you have agriculture,” he says. “All the things that we depend on to live are premised on having relatively predictable seasons, air, water. … It’s not that all of the other issues that we’re facing are not important, it’s just that this seems foundational.”

He’s not just lending his band’s name to the effort, but keeping up to date on progress and making sure that the effort will not be in vain. The Oregon and Washington trees will be planted starting in May, while the California plantings will begin a little later in an effort to avoid fire season, he said.

He also confirmed that the planted trees will be tended to and protected by the U.S. Forest Service.

“That was one of my first concerns; like, what’s to prevent timber companies from going in there and chopping them down?” he says. “We know they’re sort of into that.”

In the meantime, he says, he’ll continue planting trees on his own—including ponderosa pines—as he’s been doing for years.

About five years ago, McCrea moved to the Portland, Ore., area. He still calls Sacramento home and says he misses Northern California, but that he was disheartened to see many of his musician friends leave the area after being priced out of it. He tried holding out at first before giving in.

“We were increasingly surrounded by rich people and stuff. It was this less interesting and different kind of culture,” he says. “We’re super judgmental about it and decided to run.”

The rest of the band is a bit spread out now. Guitarist Xan McCurdy was the first to move to Portland, and McCrea found that he could work more freely if they were together. Trumpeter Vince DiFiore is still in Sacramento, because he’s got children in school there.

It didn’t take long for McCrea to make new friends in Portland, including spending time with Northwest indie stalwarts The Dandy Warhols.

“They’re super welcoming and friendly people,” he says.

It’s been a full decade since CAKE last released an album, but McCrea says an album is in the works. He blames the delay on the band’s self-production process. He and his bandmates can spend weeks working on certain musical elements, only to decide they don’t like them and start over.

CAKE has operated like this for years because their early attempts to work with producers didn’t yield any fruit.

“In the beginning, nobody knew what the hell we were trying to do,” he says. “We wanted to turn things down, and people didn’t understand why we didn’t want to be more powerful. They didn’t understand that being weak was our way of being subversive. All the producers that were there at the time when we first started were just wanting to crank it and be really muscular. I don’t want someone to make us sound slick. I’d rather sound crappy, you know?”

John McCrea has worked on is engineering skills during the pandemic. He feels empowered being able to create the sound in his head instead of trying to communicate it to someone else. But the self-editing process means that it always takes longer to finish an album. Each of the last two albums has also taken much longer than anyone would have liked, but it’s important to be able to be ruthless in service of a song, he says.

When he and the band finish a song, he is OK with letting it sit for a month or two before returning to it to make sure he’s still happy with it. He’s also in no hurry because he doesn’t feel like touring anytime soon, and because, as an independent act, they don’t owe anyone anything. The band has, however, started talking to a distributor to prepare for a release either late this year or sometime in 2022.

“There’s an album that I’m just tinkering with, and it’s getting very close,” he says.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.