Chris Lake, Kenny Beats, and Chris Lorenzo have teamed up to rework Cake‘s 2001 alt-rock staple ‘Short Skirt/Long Jacket’ into a club track called ‘Long Jacket’, released via Long Jacket Music. It’s an unlikely pairing on paper—a dancefloor-focused house producer, a hip-hop beatmaker known for work with the likes of Vince Staples and Freddie Gibbs, and Cake’s frontman John McCrea’s deadpan vocal delivery—but the three camps found common ground in reworking one of the more recognizable alt-rock hooks of the early 2000s.
The original ‘Short Skirt/Long Jacket’ leaned on trumpet stabs, vibraslap, and McCrea’s dry, spoken-word cadence. ‘Long Jacket’ strips that arrangement down to its most hypnotic parts and rebuilds it around a rolling low end and sharp, percussive groove. Lake and Lorenzo bring the kind of precision-tuned dancefloor sensibility they’ve built individually over years of house releases, while Kenny Beats—known more for his work behind the boards in hip-hop than in dance music—adds a left-field production touch that pushes the track somewhere neither producer would likely land alone.
A Fresh Perspective on a Classic
‘Short Skirt/Long Jacket’ first appeared on Cake’s 2001 album Comfort Eagle, peaking at No. 7 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart and going Platinum in the US. Its wry lyrics and off-kilter groove gave it staying power well beyond its initial run, including a second life as the opening theme for the TV series Chuck. More than two decades later, ‘Long Jacket’ introduces the song to a dance music crowd that likely knows it only in passing, if at all.
“Getting Kenny and Chris Lorenzo in the same room was chaos in the best way,” Chris Lake said of the collaboration. “Three totally different brains on one track. Kenny’s coming from a completely different world, Chris and I have that shorthand from years of working together, it just all clicked.”
Chris Lorenzo echoed that sentiment, noting that the project had been on his and Lake’s radar for a while before Kenny Beats brought the original CAKE vocal into the room. “Almost immediately, the idea for this track clicked once Kenny showed us the original vocal from CAKE,” Lorenzo said. “We’ve been playing it in our sets for the better part of a year now, and it’s consistently been one of those records that stands out every time we play it.”
A Big Year for Chris Lake
The release lands during one of the more prolific stretches of Lake’s career. His 2025 debut album Chemistry, released on his own Black Book Records, landed in the global Top 10 on Spotify and hit No. 1 on the Dance Album charts on both Apple Music and Beatport. Lake closed out that year as Dancing Astronaut’s and SiriusXM’s Artist of the Year and as Beatport’s top-selling artist in his genre. He’s also picked up two GRAMMY nominations along the way and recently delivered an official remix of Taylor Swift’s ‘Opalite’ that reached No. 1 on iTunes.
On the live front, Lake played some of his biggest headline shows to date in 2026, including a three-night run at Under The K Bridge Park in Brooklyn and two sold-out nights at LA State Historic Park, each drawing 20,000 fans. ‘Long Jacket’ adds another unexpected chapter to a catalog that’s increasingly comfortable crossing genre lines.
