Greg Brown, a founding guitarist of the band Cake who left the Sacramento, California, group before its third album came out, has died, his former bandmates announced over the weekend. He was 56.

“It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of Greg Brown’s passing after a brief illness,” Cake said on its Facebook page.

“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 wrote the band’s enduring breakout song, “The Distance,” which was the first single off Cake’s second album, “Fashion Nugget.”

In a 2004 story by The Times that referred to Cake’s brand of rock as “part self-referential attack on musical certainty and part earnest affirmation of everything rock has ever been,” writer Dean Kuipers talked about that breakout song and the album it came out on.

“Such an approach first brought the band success, scoring a huge hit with the oblique 1996 single ‘The Distance,’ built on the neurotic image of a man pressing a car for speed in a race long over,” he wrote. “The album, ‘Fashion Nugget,’ went platinum with its unusual but effective mix of low-fi guitar, funky rhythms, bleepy new wave synths and [trumpet player-percussionist] Vince di Fiori’s oddly evocative trumpet parts. The ambiguity of that hit single was unsettled further by more jokey elements on that album — like the cover of Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem, ‘I Will Survive.’”

But by the time that story was written, Brown was long gone from Cake, having left the band in 1997, before it recorded its third album. He and Cake bassist Victor Damiani started playing music with vocalist-keyboardist Dana Gumbiner, forming the band Deathray. They, and various drummers, released one album on an indie label in 2000 and another by themselves in 2005.

Brown released a solo EP, “ The End of Something New,” in 2023.

“I might have told you one thing back when I was 27 years old, and I left hot headed and mad about what I considered to be irreconcilable personality problems or whatever,” Brown said of his departure from Cake in a 2021 Billboard feature about the band. “As 51-year-old me, I see a much larger context of what was going on in my life. Rather than get into all of it, 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.”

On Saturday, Gumbiner of Deathray remembered Brown with a Facebook post in which he said the guitarist died after a “long illness,” not a brief one, as his Cake bandmates said. He and Brown played together most recently at the end of 2024, he said.

“There’s no way to articulate how much Greg’s friendship and creative partnership meant to me,” Gumbiner wrote. “He quietly and comprehensively changed my life and the lives of so many in his orbit. Forgive me for this (he would give me a cold stare of disapproval after reading this), but from the first time we began making music together, Greg really saw me. And we ALL saw Greg. I mean, I had a huge crush from the moment my first band opened for CAKE at the Cattle Club ... He was *vicious* onstage. By the time we were out on tour with CAKE, and I could witness the contrast between that coiled, visceral magnesium flame night after night and his quiet, reserved (occasionally smirking) stoicism offstage, I was *done*. It was true love.”

Gumbiner said he felt he could trust Brown “completely” when it came to songwriting.

“I couldn’t have been more in creative harmony with someone. We grew close, but of course, only *so* close. Greg was one of my best friends, whom I knew almost *nothing* about,” he said. “He could be frustratingly closed off at times, and heartbreakingly candid at others. We’d sometimes write songs about each other and each other’s lives in oblique ways. But we seldom talked directly about feelings or deeply personal challenges. This was Greg, or at least one dimension of the complex kaleidoscope of who he was. Despite that, or maybe because of it, I loved him like a brother.”

Weezer co-founder and former bassist Matt Sharp called Brown his “shyest, most gentle and delicate friend” in an Instagram post Sunday.

“Just a few years ago Greg flew all the way down from Sacramento to LA just to tell me how much he loved me and what a big impact our time together has had on his life. It was important to him that we share this moment face to face. It’s simply devastating to think of my sweet friend, as shy as he was to break through all that shyness to be so open hearted and vulnerable,” wrote the bassist, who worked with Brown on the 2004 solo record “Matt Sharp.”

“So there we were, just two men of certain age sitting across from each other, surrounded by redwood trees, voicing our deep sense of gratitude for being able to have shared meaningful time together, in between long moments of silence, birds chirping and other soft sounds of the neighborhood. We talked of how too much time had passed and how we had to make more time for each other in the future. I loved him more than he could ever have known, but I take some small comfort knowing that at least I tried to express those feelings in whatever limited way I could, on that tranquil afternoon.”

Sharp said all of his thoughts were with Brown’s “friends, family and children.”

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