Cage The Elephant’s Matt Shultz On Why His Arrest Was A Miracle

Cage the Elephant frontman Matt Shultz definitely subscribes to the Rolling Stones belief that sometimes “You get what you need.” In January 2023, Shultz was arrested on firearms charges. Now he calls that arrest “a miracle.”

As he explains, it got him the help he needed for a psychotic crisis brought on by a medication he was prescribed. Much of that experience can be found on the band's superb new album, Neon pill.

Although Shultz did not understand everything that was happening due to psychosis, he wrote much of it from both the conscious and especially the subconscious. Having been through it all, Shultz has come out the other side with a renewed appreciation for music.

We talked about psychosis, songwriting, losing her father, her favorite song from the new album and more.

Steve Baltin: How did the new stuff go for you? Were there any songs that really came out to be played?

Matt Shultz: The great thing is that I think everything was connected, which is not always the case. Sometimes you have a song that has yet to be what becomes “Cigarette Daydreams.” I remember when we started playing this and seeing the more thoughtful crowd scared the crap out of me. I said, “Ugh, maybe they don't like it.” But it went very well. So you can't always judge how the audience reacts. But so far so good.

Baltin: Were there any that really stood out and were fun for you? You did a bunch of shows – the Echoplex Show, I got invited to iHeart. So you have to do it in front of at least a couple of different audiences.

Shultz: Yeah, I think the standout for me, “HiFi (True Light)” actually did a lot better than I thought it would. It was one of the most well-received new tracks. “Good time” went very well. Also “Rainbow”. “Rainbow” is my favorite song so I was excited about this shit.

Baltin: Was there a song early on that really drove this record?

Shultz: “Rainbow” was probably the first song written in the whole writing process. But I would say not necessarily a particular song, but more studio sessions. Because it was split into several sessions over the past five years. But when we went back to the studio at Sonic Ranch in El Paso, that's when the album started to take shape and we started to find the identity of the record. And after that, everything was nice and smooth.

Baltin: What was the identity that started to take shape for you?

Shultz: For myself, going into the pandemic, I had a pretty tough life event. “Tough” is selling short, but I was prescribed a drug and then unknowingly fell into a psychosis, which is one of the interesting things about “Rainbow.” “Rainbow” was the last song I wrote in my right mind before the psychosis took over, and then I continued to write over the course of those five years. Then I got arrested in New York, which turned out to be a miracle. It saved my life. I was hospitalized for two months, and then six months of outpatient therapy. During the six months of outpatient therapy, we started going back into the studio, and that's when the album really took shape identity-wise. It was very interesting, because going through the material that I had written while I was very ill was almost like this force when I had to decode some of what I was saying and it meant something totally different than where it ended up. I was looking through them and trying to find the feeling that the subject might not be based in reality, and then stay with the feeling. Once that started to become clear to me and where I could use some of what I wrote while I was sick and on the record, that started to make “Rainbow” take shape. But that was probably the biggest turning point for me, getting back to where I was when I wrote “Rainbow.” It was like putting life on pause. That is being generous. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, but it's a miracle I'm here today. That really affected the content of the lyrics, no doubt.

Baltin: When you come back and listen Neon pillAre there things you hadn't yet processed that you're seeing now?

Shultz: Being in psychosis and perhaps understanding, I feel that psychosis is understood through the lens of the passenger seat or through the lens of a doctor's eyes. But to really understand it is to go through it. Again, it was really like going into a coma and having someone else take the driver's seat, and then waking up and dealing with all the consequences. Not just the things you're dealing with based on the actions you've taken, but thoughts and ideas and a whole belief system. So it took a while to get back into healthy reality testing. One of the things was going back, and sometimes having these almost deep arguments with myself, not really “arguments” but internal disagreements where I believed something so deeply and now I could see so clearly that what I had come to believe in this time period was false. The challenge was not to ignore it because even though it wasn't based in reality, the emotional impact was real. So that's what I tried to focus on, the emotional aspect. “Neon Pill,” for example, I wrote “Neon Pill” when I was still very sick. But I wasn't ready to face it consciously. I was doing it on a subconscious level. There were a lot of songs that were directly about things that I was going through, but I wasn't even able to recognize it until I was well, if that makes sense.

Baltin: Do you see how the things you've been through have influenced this record?

Shultz: More and more, every time I listen or perform. Some of the things I hear in my songs, even my songs that aren't from this turbulent time in life, still happen. But that's one of the really cool things about the songs. There are some things that are so subconscious that you might not recognize what you were getting at until five, 10 years later. But yeah, when I was getting my life back together after going through that period of time, there's definitely a lot that we go through to work through lyrics.

Baltin: Can you give examples of a couple of them? The ones that stand out to you lyrically?

Shultz: Well, this isn't directly related to this album because it was written years ago, but this is a creepy thing that hit me. I was performing “Trouble” the other night, there's that lyric that goes, “I've got so much to lose, I've got so much to prove, God don't let me lose my mind.” And it was like one of those moments where I was like, “Wow, you don't always get what you want. Sometimes the answer in life is no, or sometimes it's yes.” This is quite deep and powerful. For me, it was humbling. So things like this happen very often. Maybe that was a little deeper for me because of what I went through. But let me think about anything in this piece. Well, “Out Loud” on this record, also during the pandemic, my father died. We had some really precious moments where he shared some stories with me that he had never shared before. And he was telling me about a time when, I guess he was in his twenties, he was working in construction for his father. And they had argued, a particularly bad argument, and she had told her father that she would never speak to him again. He actually hitchhiked to Florida and was there for quite some time. He began to feel a lot of remorse, obviously, for arguing with his father and having that broken relationship. Anyway, he wrote a song to his father to apologize. Then he hitchhiked all the way back to Kentucky and played it, the first thing he ever did. Then they had a moment where they hugged and cried. It was this beautiful union. This really moved me, and so I wrote it. song based on that story, but for me, I was going through so much that I was definitely pouring myself into that song as well, even though what I was going through in terms of the medication causing the psychosis wasn't necessarily something that could control it doesn't take away from the fact that I have regrets about a lot of the things that happened in that time period. So that's just a small example of that, sure. Neon pill it was written before all the events happened. The arrest was more of a miracle than anything. But it was kind of weird to hear the lyrics to something that essentially happened after I wrote it. It's exactly what happened, that maybe I felt it coming or something, on a subconscious level.

Baltin: Going back to something that Nick Cave told me, he said that he finds that he always writes what he's looking for. So if you're sad, write happy songs. And when he's happy, he writes sad songs. He said that as an artist, you always write what you miss. So for you, when you say it's interesting that you almost knew it was going to happen, maybe it's also something that had to happen.

Shultz: That's what I'm saying. There are many things we “ask for in life” and the answer is not always yes. But the answer is always what you need, I think. And I couldn't agree with you more.

Baltin: Does the record change in a live environment? It's very personal to you, but now thousands of fans who didn't have the psychosis but definitely have their own versions of it are bringing their own experience and feeling to it.

Shultz: This is a very layman's understanding of psychosis, but hopefully it makes sense. Every day, every human being goes through reality tests. We have things that happen, and then we reflect on what that is and what it meant and what was most likely. This is how the human mind works. And psychosis is just a poor test of reality. It's when your reality checks aren't working the way they should and you don't have a logical mind. So, no doubt, we all experience it at different levels. That's one of the things that makes it relatable. That being said, part of what you were asking about earlier, as far as the songs taking on a new meaning, 100 percent because some of what the songs were supposed to mean when I wrote them, had nothing to do with reality. Therefore, I had to find the feeling that I was getting at that time, rather than the reality that I believed. And one of the overwhelming takeaways from the whole experience is this extreme feeling of gratitude and appreciation. It's bittersweet, because there is this scar that will be there for the rest of my life, like living life with a broken heart. But a broken heart can be a beautiful thing. Someone once told me that the heart is like the earth, and to have a soft heart, you have to experience pain. The things that create nature's most fertile soil are decomposition. So it's something else that's like a blessing and a beautiful burden at the same time.