Cage the Elephant visits ASU

By: Nicholas B. Francis

Posted: 2/23/10

The modern-rock band, Cage the Elephant, performed a live acoustic show in the Jaguar Student Activities Center on Feb. 15 to a near-capacity audience.

Originally from Bowling Green, Kentucky, the five-man band has worked its way up from relative obscurity to become one of the most well-known names on popular radio today. Their hit songs "Ain't No Rest For the Wicked" and "Back Against the Wall" are easily recognizable to anyone familiar with today's music scene.

With a sound that refuses to be caged by a single musical genre, the band mixes their love of different styles of music to produce an undeniably unique sound that is both explosively experimental and comfortably familiar at the same time.

Although many music critics like to take the easy way out by comparing the group to other artists like "Artic Monkeys" and "Beck," there is no way to describe them in terms of any other groups. Cage the Elephant simply sounds like Cage the Elephant.

Matt Schultz, the band's lead singer, along with the band's two guitarists, Brad Schultz (who is Matt's brother) and Lincoln Parish, sat down with us for an interview after their performance to discuss their new album, their musical influences and what the future holds for Cage the Elephant.

BR: Do you normally play small shows like this?

Matt: Actually, we just played a show in our hometown. It wasn't really a show; it was just like six songs. We just got up in our hometown bar and played.
Lincoln: We just kept it a secret and announced it like 5 hours before. We played, and it was at capacity, like you couldn't get in until someone walked out. That was pretty exciting.

Matt: We do a lot of radio performances and stuff like this as well.

BR: How many more dates do you have on the tour for this year?

Matt: I think that we'll probably be spending most of the summer doing a little light touring of our own and preparing for our new record. We just finished our new record and we're going to be releasing that.

BR: When will the new record be out?

Matt: It will be out in the mid to late summer.

BR: Do you guys like playing smaller shows better than larger ones?

Brad: Both are good for their own reasons

Matt: With a smaller show, you can have a more intimate kind of feeling. With a larger crowd, there's an impact from the size of it. I don't know. They're both good.

Brad: As long as there's a good vibe, at any show, it can be a good show.

BR: Do you guys do many acoustic shows?

Brad: We normally do a few songs (acoustic), but we've never done like a whole acoustic show or anything. Wait, actually we did in London. We did a show at an old church with us and The Killers and GLASS VEGAS and a few other bands. We did all-acoustic sets.

BR: What's your favorite song to perform live?

Matt: Oh, man. I really like performing "Fox Scorpion" by Pavement. I also like "Sabertooth Tiger" or "Indie Kids."

Brad: We're really just excited about getting to play our new songs and stuff. We've been playing these old songs for a long time.

BR: I kind of figured that you guys were about tired of playing "There Ain't No Rest For the Wicked."

Matt: You always love that part of you, you know, that's a part of your past. People used to ask Miles Davis, you know, 'What direction are you going?' and he would always say 'forward.' That's kind of the way we feel, that we're continuing to move forward. We don't want to be stale or dormant.

BR: The second track on your album is named 'James Brown.' I don't know if you guys are aware of it or not, but Augusta is the birthplace of James Brown.

Lead: Really?!?! Sick!

BR: What is it that made you decide to name that particular song after James Brown?

Lead: Because the song had the name 'James Brown' in the lyrics…No, we really just wanted to use James Brown as an example. There was a guy that we knew who was in a band, we're not going to say his name, but he thought really highly of himself. Maybe it's just my opinion, but it didn't seem to me that he was really doing anything
groundbreaking. Not that we were doing anything groundbreaking either, but what they were doing was just like a carbon copy of other things that had been done before. That's kind of where that came from.

Brother: We were just saying that he was trying to act just like another James Brown or something. He thought that he was something that he wasn't.

BR: When you guys were answering questions from the audience after the concert, you said something about Lincoln getting adopted by one of your friends. What was that all about?

Lincoln: Because we were going into Canada and we were about to move over to England, I had to have a guardian. If you're a minor, you can't go out of the country without a legal guardian, so I had to have our road manager at that time, who was one of our friends, get legal guardianship of me.

Matt: Needless to say, he didn't do very good parenting. Lincoln turned out terrible. He's a rotten child. We spoiled him. Every day we brought 'gifts' to him.

BR: What's your favorite band that's still currently touring?

Matt: Well, I saw the Pixies recently in L.A. We actually had a show to do down the street and the Pixies were playing 30 minutes before we were scheduled to play. So we went to the show and watched the Pixies and then we basically had to run to the place where our show was and jumped right on stage. The Pixies weren't even finished and I told the crowd at our show that they should leave our show and go see the Pixies. I was like 'What are you doing here? Why are you not at the Pixies show right now?'

Brad: 'My Morning Jacket' is always awesome live. Matt has started crying at almost every show he's ever been to.

Matt: Dude, seriously, I cried. I had to put my sunglasses on.

For anyone who missed the show at Augusta State University or anyone who saw the band in concert and wants to see them again, Cage the Elephant will be touring all over the country this summer and will release its new sophomore album sometime in the near, although undetermined, future.