Matt Shultz has lost his wallet. As I wait on the line near the end of our interview, he scurries about his hotel room, muttering to himself as he searches. He has to hop into a waiting van downstairs that will whisk him off to a radio interview in Chicago in a matter of minutes but he has to have his wallet. “Oh there, I found it. I’m good now,” he says with a relieved laugh. After some time away from the spotlight, Shultz and his Cage The Elephant bandmates – brother Brad, drummer Jared Champion, guitarist Lincoln Parish and bass player Daniel Tichenor – are back in hustle and bustle mode, promoting a new album. Interestingly titled Melophobia, the Kentucky alternative rockers have once again captured the lightning bug freneticism of their live shows and superglued them together into an album that has more depth and electricity than their previous outing, 2011’s Thank You Happy Birthday. Although not as acerbically spunky as their 2009 self-titled debut, which zoomed them to meteoric status via three hit singles (“Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked,” In One Ear” and “Back Against The Wall”), there is a maturity in this mix that heightens the meanings behind the words without losing the youthful anxiety of moths to a flame.
From the trippy surfer buzz of “It’s Just Forever,” featuring the punk sizzle of Kills/Dead Weather vocalist Alison Mosshart, to the psychedelic schizophrenia of “Black Widow” and “Halo,” to the liquid daydreaming crescendo of “Cigarette Daydreams,” Cage The Elephant are back skipping through the garden gnomes with buzz saws. Jumpstarting everything off with a David Letterman performance that had the red-headed host giddy with praise, the band is primed to keep stage-diving up the charts.
So Matt, what have you been up to today?
I am in Chicago. We’re just starting a promo tour so we’ve been holding up in the hotel for several hours.
Bored?
Oh no, I’ve been illustrating the new music video for “Come A Little Closer” so I’ve been drawing a lot and my hand is starting to cramp (laughs). It’s fine. It’s like really addictive and I enjoy it.
Do you do the artwork for the album covers?
No, that’s a good buddy of mine and his name’s Clint Colburn, a phenomenal artist. But I’ve always kind of drawn and did individual arts and now I’m actually putting it to use. Hopefully it turns out cool. We have an animator who is going to animate the images but I’m just illustrating it.
You must be happy to finally be getting your new music out to your fans?
Absolutely. It’s been forever. Well, not forever, but it’s been about a year writing and recording. We finished it about four months ago so to have to sit on a secret for that long is very difficult (laughs). I’ve been definitely anxious to get it out. It’s kind of like the day before Christmas extended over four months (laughs). You never know how people are going to react to this, if the music is going to find a place in their hearts or their trash bins.
What is the most noticeable difference between the band today and the band that recorded that first album?
Just life experiences, really. I think we’ve picked up things along the way and hopefully we’ve been able to apply those to the creative process. Also, just in the inner workings of things it’s been really interesting. This record really was like a culmination of everything we’ve learned thus far, and even more, cause it was extremely experimental as in the creative process. In the past we’d kind of held fast to what a lot of literature writers hold fast to, which is read way more than you write. So in the same respect we would listen to as much diversity as we possibly could and then incorporate that into our music, try to find a hole within music that was a sound that we didn’t hear being made at that time. And so it was kind of like a culmination of all the things we loved about music.
But on this record, we really distanced ourselves from external influences. So during the entire process of making this record, I barely listened to any musical recordings. It was kind of comparable to like trying to draw a childhood friend from memory or a childhood home from memory. And it was really interesting because the mind will fill in sonic blanks with emotional experiences. So the emotion guides the memory more than what actually took place. It’s really cool.
Seems like you did a lot of thinking and exploring back into yourself.
Yeah, I just wanted the uniqueness of like the individual fingerprint to come through. I think that more often than not, just in the human struggle, you search for things that are palatable rather than standing in naked honesty. And we didn’t want to make a record that was full of premeditated images of self. There is an overwhelming lure to cater to cool or to create music to appear artistic or intellectual or creative. It’s not so much like creating a song as it is allowing the song to take place and to formulate and to find the best scenario possible for that to happen. Cause when you break things down to music theory, there is only so many tones – I’ve just gone off on a tangent, sorry (laughs). My point is, I wanted to capture the uniqueness of whatever it is that we have to offer.
Throughout history, great artists got better as time went by, you know. If you’re working at your craft and constantly learning and applying those learnings to what you do, you get better. But I think from a psychological standpoint if you tell someone that a wall is too high to climb, most likely they won’t climb it. So if you start telling people that as time goes by they lose their creativity, they’re going to believe that, which is a total fallacy completely.
Do you think that your songwriting has matured? Do you think you’re better at it today?
I hope so (laughs). I hope that we continue to learn and that we’re able to apply those learnings to our creative works.
When you and your brother were kids, out of the two of you, who was the one who had the most faith that you could make it as a professional band?
You know, when we were kids, I think I was more worried about dressing up like a Civil War soldier (laughs). I was so hugely into the Civil War and the history and stuff. I actually had my mother make me a Civil War uniform, a Union uniform, and I wore it all the time. I would wear it to school. I even wore my Civil War hat to baseball practice (laughs) which is ridiculous. But as teenagers, my brother and I both loved music. You always have dreams but reality is always so different than you imagine things.
Melophobia has some new bings and whistles on it. What song would you say took the longest to mold and lock down in the studio?
“Take It Or Leave It” and it wasn’t so much of a sonic thing as it was finding the right melodies and the right arrangement for the song and movements. And it took a while for the chorus to really take shape. The funny thing about the song was when we first wrote it the verse had the most promise out of any songs we had written and we were so excited about it. So we just kind of threw something together for a chorus or whatever and we went in the studio and it wasn’t happening. We spent days working through that one and gave up actually on it (laughs). And it drove me nuts because our producer, every time I’d talk about how many songs we had, I would always talk about “Take It Or Leave It” as being one of the songs we had. And he said, “You can’t count that song, it’s not a song.” And it would get under my skin and drove me crazy (laughs). “It is TOO a song. It just hasn’t been fully realized yet. Don’t use that kind of vocabulary.” (laughs)
But there was this one day I woke up and I was in my living room and I was sitting there thinking about it and I just grabbed the guitar and started playing and singing the first thing that came to my mind. I didn’t want to think about it or have any notion of what I was trying to do. I just wanted it to happen and it just poured out. I recorded it on my iPhone and I was like, “Ok, step away.” So I went and took a shower and after I got done, I came back down the stairs and I played it back to myself and I just sprinted out to my car and drove straight to Nashville (laughs).
You have Alison Mosshart singing with you on “It’s Just Forever.” How did you get her to sing with you?
That’s a good question (laughs). When we first wrote the song, I knew from the very beginning I wanted it to be a duet. And I was very inspired by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You.” I loved the whole idea of this morbid love story and in “I Put A Spell On You” it’s predominately the man who is the creepy individual in the relationship. But I thought, Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a story about a relationship where both parties were grossly obsessed with each other, where they were both insanely obsessed, like it was just, you know, creepy and morbid. So that’s where I got the idea from and we wrote the lyrics and the melody and kind of a guideline and sent it out to Alison Mosshart and she got back to us relatively quickly and it happened really fast. She came to the studio and she’d just gotten over the flu so she was worried that she wasn’t going to be able to give a great performance. But it only took two takes cause she was that amazing. And she also made some lyrical contributions that made a huge difference. So I can’t say enough good things about her. She’s a very, very talented individual. But it was pretty sweet how it worked out.
Why did you pick “Come A Little Closer” as your first single?
You know, it was like a group decision and our management felt very strongly about the single and it was a song that we all thought would be a single, not necessarily what we thought would be the first single, but it’s been really cool to see it grow and see people react to it.
Jared, your drummer, I felt like he has really come into his own, like a quiet assassin because he sneaks up on you and after you’ve listened to the album, you realize what an integral part he is of the band’s sound. He really shines on this album.
Absolutely. When we first started creating the record, we knew that we wanted to do something that had more movement and more of a rhythmic feel to it and Jared totally stepped up and he killed it. That’s like his forte. On the last record, it was more of a punk record, straight-forward, which isn’t Jared’s thing and I kind of felt bad. So I wanted to make a record that he would have a lot of fun playing.
Is the energy that the fans give you when you’re performing, is that what makes your concerts so alive?
It definitely plays into the music communal thing. It’s a thing that’s meant to communicate and to commune with each other and it’s for the body and yeah, it’s definitely part of it. And then I’d say the other part is just like trying to put yourself back in that place, the same frame of mind that you were when you wrote the song and to remember that. And that plays a big part as well because you want to give honest performances that are real and not just make it a show, you know.
What is the hardest part about performing live for you?
Getting to that place where you’re not playing a character and it’s real. That takes a few moments; usually takes about the first twenty seconds into the show (laughs).
When do you start touring?
I’m not sure. I know that they’re definitely working on setting up tours so as soon as the year begins, we’ll be doing some more touring for the most part. For the rest of the year there will probably be spot gigs and like promotional things, which is kind of a bummer but it’s cool. It gives people time to let the record sink in so when we start playing shows they’ll be familiar and it’ll be great. I can’t wait to play them live.
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