A Conversation with Cage The Elephant’s Matt Schultz – HuffPost 9.23.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey Matt, how are you?

Matt Shultz: I’m doing well, how are you?

MR: Pretty good. I want to talk to you about a couple of things. Let’s start off with “Come A Little Closer,” which was the number one added track on alternative radio. What does it feel like to have instant acknowledgement from radio and fans over the latest Cage The Elephant project?

MS: It feels great. It always comes as a surprise. Usually, in the beginning stages, it’s always hard to believe. You wait to see some kind of tangible proof that it’s finding its way to people’s hearts and not just kind of an industry push, if you know what I mean.

MR: Yeah. It seems that to have a number one record, it has to be for reasons beyond just a lot of promotion; you have to have the goods.

MS: Our main goal as songwriters is to tell stories that are compelling and impactful and honest. I always felt that the songs reach people and provoke thought and searching or even just illustrate some sort of picture that captures a person for longer than the three minutes it might be on the radio. It’s always exciting and a surprise.

MR: How did the song “Come A Little Closer” come together? Do you guys have a usual creative process?

MS: When we first started writing, we had several different visions for how we thought the record might turn out and this was kind of more geared towards that more intimate, close sound at first. Actually, before we were even conceptualizing sounds, we had just done Lollapalooza in South America. I can’t remember which city it was, but we were in one of the airports and there was just this amazing flamenco guitarist and he had a real gypsy nature to what he was doing and it was just fricking gorgeous. It had that sound that just puts you into a trance. Do you remember the movie Big?

MR: That’s one of my favorite movies.

MS: Yeah, and the part where he goes to the genie machine and the circus music comes on and just puts you in this strange hypnotic state, reflecting and whatnot? Well, this guitarist is playing some stuff like that. It just was inspiring. I had an acoustic guitar with me and I went to a terminal where there weren’t a lot of people and pulled out the guitar and just started playing something similar. The funny thing was in my mind, I was thinking Bulgarian folk or something. But that was kind of the first stage of things, and then I think in another city, it might have been in Brazil, São Paolo. I got up early one morning and my hotel was just overlooking all of the shacks on the hill that were built out of tarps and tin roofs, a makeshift city, and I was just moved and started messing around again and came up with the chorus and then bridged the two together. Then the rest of the song took shape when we met up with the band.

MR: Interesting, especially since Melophobia has, to me, some global nods in spots.

MS: Yeah, I guess so, because a lot of it was written while we were moving around and definitely while we were more inspired and impacted by world experiences being more exposed to different cultures and people. I always find it so strange because we have these cultures that seem so far apart at times but there’s always the common fiber that runs through it, which is family. You see a grandparent interact with a grandchild and it doesn’t matter where you are, it looks the same.

MR: Really true. Now I’ve been a long time fan, and “Cage The Elephant,” to me, seems like it could also be a reference to how you just can’t contain the musicianship, the creativity, or the fun that you guys are having.

MS: Oh, thank you.

MR: Is that what’s going on these days?

MS: I don’t know if we think of it on those terms. We tend just to focus on the creative process and where we are at that point, not necessarily on trying to be uncensored or unbridled. A lot of our struggles aren’t against exterior forces but really our interior. A big part of this record was trying to overcome that overwhelming lure to cater towards “cool” or to write towards a particular sound that maybe, at that time, we see society as being artistic or intellectual or creative rather than writing from a place of honesty. This past year, me and the band had a lot of revelations. Hopefully, they’ll be long term revelations. But it’s just become very apparent to me that there are many different purposes for music: to entertain, to relieve pain, to express a thought or a feeling, to tell a story. One of the main purposes, at least speaking for myself, is to be a communicator. Upon having that revelation, I dove into this idea that the more we could pull away from the institutional sounds that we as a culture have deemed acceptable and just use music as a communication, hopefully, the more impactful the songs can be. What I mean by that is that there is this overwhelming lure to write towards sounding intellectual or artistic based upon what has been seen as artistic or intellectual in the past. Sometimes, I think the honesty gets sacrificed for aesthetic and feel, you know? I love all that stuff, I love hearing well-crafted and stylized songs sonically, but at the same time, another revelation that I had was just the uniqueness and the beauty of the human fingerprint.

The fact that we’re a bunch of creatures crawling around on a planet in the middle of the universe is an anomaly, and the fact that you can make sounds that are pleasing to the ear is even more beautiful. In the past I’d always tried to hold fast to that slogan that a lot of literature writers hold to, which is “Read way more than you write.” So I would apply that to music and would try to listen to as much and as diverse music as I possibly could and kind of be a conduit or a sponge and try to find holes and combine sounds to make something that maybe I wasn’t hearing exactly like what I was doing at that time. On this record, it was different though, where I almost stopped listening to music completely. The experience was comparable to trying to draw your childhood house purely from memory. Sounds and things are burned into my psyche and will be there for the rest of my life probably, but it was such a direct influence and it was really amazing because I found that there are blanks that the human mind will fill, sonic blanks, with emotional experiences, and creates sonics that never even happened on particular records purely based upon a memory of an emotion. It was crazy because you can either be in a group of people discussing sounds and records and everyone in the group will be in agreement and it’s nothing like what the entire collective agreed upon.

It’s crazy, the power of suggestion. It also shows how emotional we are and how we’re affected by our emotions connected to memories and times. But it was a really amazing experience. Before, it was like trying to absorb as much style as I possibly could, hoping that somehow you could come up with something different as a culmination of all the elements. But this time, it was like trying to shake off that pre-learned style and just allow experiences to speak through the music. There are many different great approaches, though, and absorbing music isn’t a bad approach. It was just that on this particular record, we experimented and pushed outside that and it was pretty cool.

photo credit: Colin Lane

MR: You also had an old pal with you again, who’s almost an additional member, producer Jay Joyce. What was your first reaction when you heard his In Pursuit project from the eighties?

MS: I haven’t heard that.

MR: Oh, you’ve got to hit him up for that! He was part of a group called In Pursuit on MTM, Mary Tyler Moore’s label. You’ve got to have him play that stuff for you.

MS: [laughs] Yeah, he’s played me some stuff from another band of his called Iodine, which was really cool. Jay is an incredibly talented person, very diverse, he’s the type of guy that always slides under the radar. It seems like you never really see the cool stuff he does, you just hear it later.

MR: I totally agree, he’s one of these mega-creative guys that’s behind the scenes on a lot of projects.

MS: Yeah. He has an incredible ability to hear what you’re going for, to interpret that, and to make it happen and also to pull more out of you. Jay’s the type of person that will totally confront you in your shortcomings. If you’ve written a part that isn’t quite there yet, he’ll tell you. That’s one of the best things and worst things about Jay. It’s one of the hardest things to deal with, but it’s one of the reasons why we make records together; because he pushes us to the full extent of our potential.

MR: On this new album, is there a song that we need to run to immediately?

MS: I don’t know, I can only speak for my favorite tracks on the record, but there’s a track that we did with Alison Mosshart, which is really cool. It was inspired by “I Put A Spell On You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. So that track was kind of like this morbid love story of a man who was grossly obsessed with a girl, and we’d written this song and I was trying to find the character in the song and I just thought it would be cool if it was a male and female duo, but instead of it just being one-sided in this morbid love, if both partners of the relationship were grossly obsessed with each other. I was like “That would be interesting,” if it wasn’t just one-sided, if they both were just completely obsessed. That was a really fun song to write and it was great to have Alison Mosshart on the track because she totally killed it and got the character and it sounds phenomenal. She’s just so talented. Then there’s “Telescope,” which is probably my favorite track on the record. It’s kind of like a self-portrait from a third party. I just thought it would be interesting to write a song about yourself as if you were watching yourself through a telescope on a different planet far away and how you might feel different about your everyday habits and the meaningless things that we fill the void with. We’d been on the road for like five years and this was the first time we spent any time off the road and I got a house for the first time. So I moved into my house and I got obsessed with decorating this house, which there was no one in but me, and then the house was decorated and then I’m like, “Okay, I’m in the living room. I think I’m going to go walk in the kitchen for a while.” So I’d go walk to the kitchen and stand in the kitchen and any time I needed a change of scenery I’d go to a different room. Sometimes I’d just be sitting there staring at a blank TV screen and be like, “What is the point?” “What am I doing here?” “Why am I filling my life with all of these tedious little tasks that aren’t making any kind of contribution to anything other than my own entertainment?” It was a song that was kind of about that with a little more color and playfulness.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

MS: Just to pour your whole heart into your creative works. With each one of our records, we try to become more and more transparent and to hide less of ourselves with each song that we write and also to pour everything we have into it. Let go of this kind of romanticized rock ‘n’ roll fairytale and write songs for the sake of writing songs and for the art of it and the expression of it, and do it with everything you have. I come across a lot of kids who have big dreams and high hopes, but they’re not spending the time with it. If you look at some of the great composers throughout history like Bach or Mozart or Beethoven and you look at their history and just how immersed in music they were, it’s no wonder they wrote thousands of masterpieces; because they spent time with it.

MR: What does Bowling Green think of its native sons these days?

MS: [laughs] I can’t speak for Bowling Green, but we have a lot of great friends and family here, a lot of support, and over the years, it’s been great that I have a really solid core of friends and family that are super honest with me and will tell me if a song sucks or not. I think that’s important. So we still have the same process, we come home and spend time with our friends and we sit around and write songs and we bash each other and build each other up and it’s just really cool.

MR: Does it feel like each album is a new beginning?

MS: Every record feels like we’ve just started, for us. It’s kind of like every time you finish a record and step away from it, when you step back to begin writing again, it’s like you’ve forgotten everything that you knew and you have to relearn everything. You can’t just fall back on your past experiences or success or whatever; it’s always like a new trip and there’s more ground to cover. I feel like it’s always the first time I’ve learned how to write a song. “Now I finally get it!” It’s just beginning. I hope it’s always like that.

MR: I hope it’s always like that for you, too. I’ve been looking forward to this interview, I really appreciate it.

MS: Yeah, I appreciate it as well.

MR: All right, all the best and take care. Hopefully, we’ll talk in the future, let’s do this again some time.

MS: For sure.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne