Music Cage The Elephant

By Jim Morrison

Cage the Elephant was born and shaped in a Bowling Green, Kentucky, writing songs, and getting into trouble. That’s about all there was to do, playTidball’s, the city’s longstanding club while underage.

There’s a photo on a wall there of Matt Shultz hanging by his ankles from a chain across the club’s ceiling. If you’ve seen Cage and seen Matt’s antics on stage, a mix of Mick and Iggy, it’s a reminder that he’s always challenged himself to be bolder and wilder.

“He would do anything to impress somebody,” his brother, guitarist Brad Shultz told Rolling Stone earlier this year.  “Matt’s done tons of shit to himself — broke ribs, had stitches. He would push the limits every time.”

While the band has left Bowling Green behind first for London and now for Nashville, those Ohio roots run deep.

“I don’t want to paint too dark a picture,” Matt told Rolling Stone about Bowling Green.  “The lessons I learned here about people, experiences, music, even the mistakes I made — it’s all the same concepts you find in a bigger city, just on a different scale.

“Bowling Green,” he said, “was a crash course in life.”

Their father was largely absent. They stumbled through high school. Matt worked as a plumber, writing lyrics on walls during the day, then returning to write them down at night.

On the chart-topping new album, “Tell Me I’m Pretty,” Matt Shultz told one magazine he tried to dig deeper, find the emotional response in the beginning stages of a song, though the results weren’t always easy. “When I was younger, I put so much stock in the persona, and I used a lot of characters and styles as protection from being overly held accountable for any honesty or emotions present in any of the songs,” he said. “As the years have gone on, I’ve just been trying to shed those characters and shed those stylistic safeties. The funny thing is, when you finally do that, it sounds good on paper, but if you have really deep-seated self-hatred, it’s really difficult! ”

Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys produced the disc, signaling a few changes in the band’s sound. The disc follows their Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album for “Melephobia,” their third disc.

“We’d become pretty good friends over the years. During our last tour with [The Black Keys], we showed him a couple songs,” Shultz told one interviewer. “We wanted a sound that was raw with a classic atmosphere, and he’s at the forefront of that sound. Right after [we showed him the songs], I got a text from him: “Dude, I’m making your next record!”

Matt and Brad collaborated on the writing, though technology changed their interaction. Back in the old days, they’d just come running down the stairs to share ideas. This time, they shared via their phones.

“We’ll write something,” Brad said, “then text it over quick.”

The title explores both sides of the need for approval. “It’s about duality. It sounds like a lost New York Dolls title on the surface; very shiny and glossy. And then there’s also an underbelly, this idea [of] approval that comes from living in the selfie generation, like, “Tell me I’m the best.” Matt told Entertainment Weekly. “I was recently having a conversation with my family about whether or not we were more open with our lives than ever or more private. I kind of argue on the side that we’re more private because we’re constantly curating the way we want to be perceived. More often than not, little pieces of ourselves find their way into those projected images but not a lot that really speaks volumes about a person and their identity.”

Most of the members had been together in a group named Perfect confusion when they formed Cage in 2006. A showcase at South by Southwest the next year set them on their path. They left Bowling Green behind for East London, distancing themselves from their hometown. An early song, “In One Ear,” chronicles those feelings. “It’s more a home town thing. It was about people who, when you try and do something, they just tear it down,” Matt said. “It’s a song venting frustration at that. There were some people who I considered friends, that were in bands as well, and things weren’t really happening for them and they were basically talking behind our backs.”

That the group is still evolving, finding their voices, is not surprising. “We were, let’s see, 19 and 20, we had never even listened to the Pixies or Pavement or Mudhoney or the Gang of Four, so many bands that people in bigger cities that have kind of more at their fingertips,” Brad Shultz said. “We didn’t have like a proper record shop. We just didn’t have any of that (stuff). Our first record was honest to the time we were in, but it was only scratching the surface.”

The brothers suffered through alcohol and substance abuse. Matt said he stopped taking pills after the second album and quit cold turkey at his dad’s house. “I suffer from a little depression at different times and more often than not, I find myself in this place where I feel impending doom — it’s always lingering around the corner,” Matt said earlier this year. “Maybe I fixated on it and wrote a lot about it on this record.

He explores one of the dark days of life in Bowling Green with “Sweetie Little Jean,” a song about losing someone, prompted by the July 1886 disappearance of a seven-year-old neighbor, Morgan Violi, from their apartment building’s parking lot. Part of the reason for the song was Matt’s own dealing with depression.

“Severe depression — it can seem like that person has been abducted,” Matt said. “It made me revisit Morgan’s story. It was so hardcore.”

Matt said the writing for the record was intended to create an emotional response. “The direction, really — raw, gritty, and less thought-out — involved way more of an emotional approach,” he explained. “Sometimes it felt like journal entries and I had to pull back, it was too personal.”

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Cage the Elephant, Silversun Pickups, Foals, Bear Hands

March 23

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