Cage the Elephant Can’t Be Confined

Youthink catches up with Cage the Elephant to talk about their latest album, Thank You Happy Birthday.

Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us are uncomfortable with change. But for Cage the Elephant’s lead singer Matt Shultz, change is a welcome thing, a factor that is evident in the refreshing sound of his band’s new album, Thank You Happy Birthday.

Quite a departure from Cage the Elephant’s self-titled debut, Thank You Happy Birthday begins with a bang of surf punk and continues down this path throughout the record. Although it may seem a step too far away from the quintessential Cage the Elephant sound, the band likes to think otherwise.

Youthink recently got to chat with the charming Shultz right before the band’s gig opening for The Black Keys in Burnaby, BC. Despite the fact that we were on a tight timeline, we got a chance to discuss the band’s “sporadic” sound, their upcoming tour with the Foo Fighters and onstage wrestling.

YT: Many fans of Cage the Elephant might feel that Thank You Happy Birthday is a drastic change from your previous record. Was this change strategic or was it more of a natural evolution?
MS: I think it was definitely, it was just so natural to us, and we had written, like, 80 different ideas for the second record and most of them just didn’t feel right. But after a while we started writing songs that didn’t sound like what it was that we were going for, but we were into the song. We sort of had an inside joke that we were going to start a side project because most of the songs didn’t fit what we were trying to go for. But then after a while it just, more or less, became the album. We were kind of scared to venture outside of our box, so to speak, but we were able to get away from that, which was pretty awesome for us.

YT: How would you describe your band’s sound in a single sentence?
MS: I don’t know, I have no clue. [laughs] It’s difficult because it’s kind of all over the place; it’s very sporadic. There’s elements of punk in there, alternative, surf… More or less, I wanted the production to tie our record together and not so much the songs. We wanted each song to sound like a different band had written it.

YT: On your Facebook page, “life” is the only item listed under influences. When drawing on personal experiences for a song, does dealing with the reality or emotion of the story ever get in the way of actually completing the lyrics?
MS: Life? That’s kind of lame. [laughs] It has an effect on it, completely yeah. On being creative for sure, like when you’re writing about people around you, you need to write in code to hide who the songs are about or what the songs are about. But I’m also really into topical writing too, writing stories about other people as well.

YT: How excited are you to tour with the Foo Fighters in October and what do you hope to learn from them?
MS: I’m really excited to get to tour with them, big fans of them and just their legacy… very jealous of the stuff they’ve done with Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures and obviously Nirvana. But I don’t know what kind of wisdom they might bestow upon us. Maybe to strike up a friendship! But it should be pretty cool.

YT: What is it like to tour globally? Do you ever feel pressures to perform differently when in different countries with different or unfamiliar audiences?
MS: I love travelling and going to new countries, new places. For the last tour, we played Germany for the first time, played Belgium and Holland, Denmark, it was great! But I’ve never felt any pressure to play differently in front of our audiences. Maybe once… we played a show in Kentucky, we played this terrible club called the Mad Hatter and it was on a metal night so there were all these metal bands and then we were right in the middle, so it got a little out of control. We ended up having a wrestling match at the end of it, tackled each other…

YT: What can fans expect in the near future from Cage the Elephant?
MS: I think tonight we’re going to mystify the audience. [laughs] But I don’t know… we’re going back into the studio in September to work on another record. Most of the time when people ask me, like, “Where do we see ourselves in the future?” for me, I just, we just want to make good records and continue to make records, with the record label’s money! [laughs]