Songfacts®:

• This is Cake's cover of Gloria Gaynor's 1978 disco classic "I Will Survive," a female-empowerment anthem reworked for a male vocalist (Cake frontman John McCrea). It's a strikingly transformative cover that has held up as one of Cake's most popular songs.
• Cake lead singer John McCrea has a very deadpan delivery that can come off as mocking, but that's not what he was going for here. "I don't think there's any irony in the way I deliver that song at all," he told Billboard. "The 'disco sucks' movement was weirdly white supremacist, I think that's partially why everybody just assumed it must be a joke song. That's part of the damage of living in this country. We've got some baggage."
• Cake changed the original line "I should have changed my stupid lock" to "I should have changed my f--king lock," which didn't sit well with Gloria Gaynor, who says it's her least favorite cover of the song, "Only because they use profanity."
  
  "That's something that I would never do, in light of the fact that there are all these young people who want to emulate artists," she told Parade. "I feel very strongly about that."
• Cake's "I Will Survive" is part of their second album, Fashion Nugget, the one that broke the band with the first single, "The Distance." "I Will Survive" was released as the second single, followed by "Frank Sinatra." These songs were all delightfully distinctive, fitting in nicely on Modern Rock radio.
• Cake have an eclectic taste in cover songs. The Fashion Nugget album also includes their off-kilter renditions of the standard "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps" and of the Willie Nelson song "Sad Songs And Waltzes." Other songs they've covered include "Half As Much" by Hank Williams, "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, and "The Guitar Man" by the '70s soft rockers Bread.