Greg Brown, the guitarist and co-founder of 1990s alt-rockers Cake, has died, aged just 56.
Cake are probably best known – in the UK at least – for The Distance, which reached Number 22 in the spring of 1997. Technically, they’re not one-hit wonders – the follow-up, a straight-as-a-die cover of I Will Survive also went Top 30 a couple of months later.
In the US their biggest hit was Never There, the lead single from their 1998 album Prolonging The Magic, which reached 78 on the Billboard chart that autumn.
The band took to Instagram to break the news, writing: “It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of Greg Brown’s passing after a brief illness.”
“Greg was an integral part of Cake’s early sound and development. His creative contributions were immense, and his presence – both musical and personal – will be deeply missed. Godspeed, Greg.”
Brown was a founder member of the band, but left after their 1996 album, Fashion Nugget, which housed The Distance. He later formed a band called Deathray and worked with two different members of Weezer – on Rivers Cuomo’s Homie side project and with bassist Matt Sharp. Brown was still active musically up until recently; he released a solo EP, The End Of Something New, in 2023.
Sharp has posted a touching tribute to his friend on Instagram, saying: “Greg Brown, my shyest, most gentle and delicate friend has passed away.”
He continued: “It’s beyond my capacity to put together the right words to describe his beautiful, beautiful soul. Our partnership, however brief, had lifetime’s worth of love, tenderness and heartbreak. We had a mutual understanding of each other’s imperfections and a mutual admiration for how we both tried to not let those imperfections get the best of us and stop us from moving forward.”
