Rock band Cage the Elephant emerge from loss and hospitalization with new album ‘Neon Pill’
By MARK KENNEDY
AP Entertainment Writer
NEW YORK (AP) β To say Cage the Elephant’s latest album had a turbulent birth would be an understatement. The band dealt with the deaths of loved ones, the pandemic and their lead singer’s arrest and hospitalization.
βItβs no secret that I had a medical crisis,β Matt Shultz tells The Associated Press from Nashville on the eve of the Friday release of the 12-track βNeon Pill.β βIβm fully recovered. It definitely left a scar, but itβs one that can be walked away from.β
In January 2023, the Kentucky raised singer-songwriter was charged with criminal possession of firearms after police found Shultzβs guns inside his room at the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan.
Shultz says that in the aftermath he discovered that for the previous three years or so he’d been having a bad reaction to a set of prescribed medications (Shultz didnβt specify which), leading to episodes of psychosis.
βItβs shocking how night and day the difference is from being on whatever medication is causing psychosis and being off of it,β he says. βAs I got off the medication, I went back to my normal self. And that was very odd because it was like having your life hijacked by another person.β
That so-called other person had contributed to the five-year recording of βNeon Pillβ and it was up to Shultz β who was hospitalized for two months and had about six months of outpatient therapy β to untangle the music.
βI went back to the lyrics, obviously to finish the album, and it was like reading the words of a totally different person and trying to decode what they meant,β he says. βA lot of it was going back and trying to find the sentiment of what I was trying to communicate.β
Shultz avoided jail time by pleading guilty to three weapons charges.
βIβm so blessed it wasnβt worse than it was,β he says. βAnd blessed that I got the medical attention I needed. Iβm incredibly blessed to be surrounded by my family, my wife. Definitely, God got me through it for sure. I would be dead several times over.”
βNeon Pillβ sees the band reunited with producer John Hill, who worked on their last 2019’s Grammy-winning βSocial Cues,β and offers a kaleidoscope of rock, from the strutting glam of βBall and Chainβ to the piano ballad of βOut Loudβ and the airy alt-rock of βFloat Into the Sky.β One song, βRainbow,β is infectiously poppy, as if Cage did a Dead or Alive track.
βIt was very much like a culmination of all the Cage records combined,β says Shultz. βJohn Hill definitely had a greater impact on this album, for sure. Not that he didnβt have an impact on βSocial Cues,β but with this one, he definitely was pushing us harder to reach within ourselves and to write the best material that we possibly could.β
The album doesn’t shy away from Shultz’s experiences and the title track drives straight into them, with the lyrics βDouble-crossed by a neon pill/Like a loaded gun, my love,β¨I lost control of the wheel.β The song has become the band’s 11th No. 1 on Billboardβs Alternative Airplay chart.
βWe definitely felt like that was the title track once everything came to be,β says Shultz, whose bandmates are his guitarist brother, Brad; bassist Daniel Tichenor; drummer Jared Champion; guitarist Nick Bockrath; and keyboardist Matthan Minster.
Two songs connect to Matt and Brad’s father, Brad Shultz Sr., including βOut Loud,β which is based on the time the elder Shultz and his father had a terrible fight and their dad ran away, hitchhiking all the way to Florida. Feeling remorseful after a year, the younger man wrote a song of apology and hitchhiked back to Kentucky to play it for his father.
Matt Shultz says he was moved by the story and βso I wrote a song about the song he wrote.β That song has the lines: βMan, I really messed up now/ Clipped those wings and I came back home/Tried my best just to carry on.”
The album’s last track, βOver Your Shoulder,β mourns his father’s death in 2020. The Shultz brothers inherited milk crates with hundreds of their dad’s songs on old cassette tapes. A new original Cage song emerged, similar to their dad’s style, with the lyrics: βDonβt look back over your shoulder/Iβm not saying donβt ask/When it feels like it gets colder/Every season will pass.β
Matt Shultz says the entire album marks a bit of a departure for a band who he admits often in the past wore their influences on their sleeves.
βWe would be in the studio and definitely at times trying to imitate and emulate. But with this record, I think, we were just really relaxed into ourselves and reaching to make something that we love.β
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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits