Cage the Elephant Singer Matt Shultz Shares His Love of Playing Intimate Venues and Writing on the Road

Matt Matasci

Kentucky quartet Cage The Elephant is known for embellishing their modern rock sound with classic influences from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Their latest album “Tell Me I’m Pretty” was released in ‘15 and includes the single “Mess Around,” which topped the Billboard Alternative chart. Produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, the album is quite diverse with songs mining inspiration from garage, punk and even glam rock. Nearing the conclusion of their tour, singer Matt Shultz spoke with Entertainment Voice about their recent touring and the songs from “Tell Me I’m Pretty” he enjoys performing most.

With your tour in support of “Tell Me I’m Pretty” wrapping up, how has this one compared to previous ones?

It’s going very well. The rooms are really great and the crowds have been awesome. We’ve been playing the new material and seeing how it translates from the record to the live show.

As Cage The Elephant has grown in popularity, has that changed your approach to live performance?

I think personal growth changes it more than success or anything like that. You’re always around other incredible performers and watching them, paying attention, being a sponge. I listened to some interviews with great performers over the years and picked up things from those interviews. I heard that Elvis . . . in every town he would come into with his band, he wouldn’t allow his band to relax at all. And he said the reason was that every crowd was a different crowd and he didn’t want his band to get disillusioned or think it was about themselves . . . that they were fully committed to being about other people’s experiences. [It’s] kind of like a giving of yourself.

How was the Spring Fling Rock AF tour with Foals and Silversun Pickups?

It went really well. They are really great friends of ours and we’ve known both of those bands for a long time. Foals [was] our first tour in England that we were main support for. Then, Silversun Pickups [was] the first tour that we ever supported in the United States [after] our first record. So we’ve known both of those guys for a long time. It was good to have everyone back together, kind of like a reunion tour! (laughs) This was the first time we toured with the Silversun Pickups in a long time.

You played a surprise house show in Austin this year at SXSW. Do you miss playing small, intimate spaces and are you able to do one-off shows like that often?

We definitely love doing those kinds of shows and do them as much as we possibly can. We do them occasionally in Nashville and the town where most of us grew up – Bowling Green. With almost every record release we do a show at a place called Tidball’s, which is one of the first bars we ever played. So we always play shows there. But long story short, yes, we love that kind of stuff.

The songs on “Tell Me I’m Pretty” cover a diverse range of styles from the fast-paced energy of “Mess Around” to the transparent emotions of “Too Late to Say Goodbye.” What songs do you love to perform the most?

The songs I like to perform most off of the new record are “Trouble,” . . . which is definitely at the top of the list. “Too Late to Say Goodbye,” “Cold Cold Cold,” “Cry Baby,” oh, and “Portuguese Knife Fight” are the songs that are the most fun to play. “Trouble” has this kind of like communal thing that happens every night, which is really awesome. It transforms from being on a record to being this shared experience, for lack of a better word. And then “Too Late to Say Goodbye” and “Cold Cold Cold” have dark undertones and there’s a lot of desperation and frustration and anger in those songs. “Cry Baby” we open the show with and it has this great introduction.

Are you guys able to get much writing done on the road or is that something you keep separate from touring?

Yeah, about as much as we have in the past. For us, we write whenever something comes to us. [It can be anything] from testing out a melody via voice note to maybe somebody messing around with a chord progression and everyone jumping in on it. We write songs more over periods of time where a lot of the piecing together happens.

After being on the road for so much of the past year, will you be relieved to be home or is it hard to adjust because you get used to life on tour?     

Recently we’ve been getting to the point where we’ve been out for so long that it’s really nice. You know, have a little time to re-gather yourself, regroup. It comes in waves. Usually, I fight that I can tolerate being on the road more than I can tolerate being at home.