How an arrest and psychosis paved the way for Cage the Elephant's first album in five years

“I called It's a Miracle.”

It's a little more than a week before the release of Cage the Elephant's first album in five years, and Matt Shultz is sitting at a corner table in the courtyard restaurant at Hollywood's Sunset Marquis Hotel, iced coffee in hand, glasses on of sun to cover his eyes. The frontman does not live up to expectations. He's happy to see the album come out at all. And he doesn't use the m word lightly.

“It's a miracle to be playing again,” he adds. “It's a miracle I'm alive.”

Back in 2019, Cage the Elephant won their second Grammy for Social cues, the band's fifth album. The years since then have been difficult in ways no one could have predicted. Shultz suffered a prolonged psychosis that lasted about three years, a condition he says stemmed from a series of medications he was taking. (Shultz did not specify which.)

He will recover. But in psychosis, the singer suffered from extreme paranoia, fear and delusions that constantly separated him from reality. He was convinced that people were after him and lost trust in most of those closest to him. Along the way, Shultz, 40, divorced his wife in 2021. At the time, he believed that leaving her would protect her from him and the delusions, he says. “It was like being in an action movie 24-7, but it's always at the most dangerous and scary part,” says Shultz. “Or like a horror movie, it was a non-stop horror movie.” (Thankfully, the couple remarried last year.)

Shultz's downfall hit a very public crescendo in early 2023 when he was arrested on gun charges for bringing loaded firearms to his New York hotel. The singer says he had no plans to use the guns and simply forgot about New York's gun laws. Immediately after the arrest, he was hospitalized for two months and underwent another six months of outpatient treatment before he could start working on the new album again.

He has referred to this conception of 2023 as a blessing. In fact, he tells me, it saved his life. “Sometimes in life you need a strong attention-getter, and that certainly got my attention,” says Shultz. “As soon as he was arrested, I was immediately taken to the hospital. Those two months were a period of time where I started having good reality checks again, where I started to understand what the real world actually was.”

Shultz wrote much of the music for Neon pill during those tumultuous three years, and the complex, painful and sometimes disparate thoughts he dealt with are “inseparable” from the record. Making the album meant deciphering the thoughts of a version of himself he left behind. “Anyone who knows what psychosis is like knows what an all-encompassing experience it is,” says Shultz. “Once I got to the other side of recovery, there was a lot of time I had to spend creating the lyrics and trying to understand the emotion behind them. After I got well again, the things that meant something deep to me weren't deep anymore. It is deeply interesting. A lot of the lyrics had a very strong meaning to me, but that meaning wasn't based in reality.”

In our chat over coffee in West Hollywood, Shultz candidly describes his struggles. The night before, Cage played a small warm-up gig at the Echoplex in Los Angeles' Highland Park neighborhood, one of their first shows after wrapping up their Night Running tour in late 2022. They had brought out friend and one-time collaborator Beck for to play their hit “Trouble” and made their debut Neon pill material such as “HiFi (True Light)” and “Rainbow”. The latter, an almost Black Keys-esque groove about how a lover lifts him back to his lowest ebb, is Shultz's favorite song on the record.

Shultz remains a high-octane frontman, one of the most exciting in rock, leaping high off the platform while gripping his microphone stand and yelling at the crowd as he steps onto the stage. He doesn't banter much with his Echoplex audience beyond expressing his gratitude and feigning the band's admiration for Beck after “Trouble” finishes, but even without talking, he has a knack for engaging the audience .

“It's a good way to get your bearings again, to not feel overwhelmed, to try out the new music for the fans,” he says. “There's always moments before you go on tour or release a record, I wouldn't necessarily say it's doubt, but you don't know if it's going to connect. [I’m curious] if I can still engage with the audience and have that conversation about the show with them. You do a show like last night and it's like, “Okay, we've been doing this our whole lives.”

Over the past year, Shultz has spent time reconnecting with people close to him, those he had cut off while in isolation. “I think there was a deep loneliness going on,” he says. “Even though I was surrounded by people who loved me and wanted to help me, I was the only one experiencing it and it felt very much like I was in an echo chamber. I would say there was a deep loneliness to this record. And that kind of unspoken shame and regret. I wasn't really in control of what was going on. I wasn't in a position to control the things that were happening or how this drug affected me, but I feel deeply remorseful for what happened, regardless.”

The phrase “neon pill” is a reference to the brightly colored medication that triggered his psychosis. On the title track, Shultz says that the pill “crossed” him, a bit ironic given that he wrote this verse in 2022, before he was ever told that the pills he was taking were hindering his mental state. At the time, Shultz thought someone was tampering with his medication. “It's strange looking back now, having written this song almost a full year before my arrest,” he says. “I think it was one of those moments where I wasn't ready to face it consciously. When my brother [Cage guitarist Brad Shultz] first heard “Neon Pill,” he said it was heartbreaking, because while I knew something was wrong, I couldn't figure out what it was. It was heartbreaking for him because he obviously saw it clearly.”

Like much of Cage's discography, Neon pill mixes deeply personal vignettes with more abstract lyrics. When asked about specific lyrics he feels reflect his experience, Shultz points to a line: “Trying to put the pieces together like a silent movie we've seen a thousand times before,” from standout “Silent Picture.” He describes his train of thought at the time as “so many surfaces that were essentially crumbs leading to nowhere.”

But Shultz says his paranoia manifested itself in strange ways. He also usually carried notebooks with him to jot down his thoughts in case he found “clues” of something he perceived someone had done to him. Then there were the polaroids of his bedroom. “I would clean my room perfectly and put everything in a perfect place,” Shultz explains. “And then I was taking a Polaroid and saving it to see if I came back and noticed someone moved something. It's really weird looking at them now because it's just a bunch of Polaroids of a perfectly clean room, but at the time, that was my security.”

About two weeks into his hospital stay, he finally felt able to stop carrying the magazines, a step Shultz said represented a major turning point in taking back control of his thoughts. “I was there for some time before they could fully titrate me off the drug—it was about two days after the drug was out of my system,” Shultz says. “It's very sad that it got to me so much and it's something that could be broken by just stopping.”

Shultz felt stable enough to take up music again about six or seven months after starting treatment. The band recorded for a little over a month in Texas at Sonic Ranch Studios. The complex, which includes five studios, a swimming pool and a basketball court on a large property in the border town of Tornillo, has allowed the group to live together and reconnect, he says. Despite the personal turmoil of recent years, the recording of the music has been comparatively uneventful. “Over the course of four years, we had about 50 percent of the album done,” says Shultz. “But during that month and a half, the remaining 50 percent is finished.”

“On all the previous records, I would try to find this character that was like our hero or whatever, and the character was mostly based in reality, but kind of fictional,” he says. “But what happened while I was psychotic, I did done the character. I didn't feel like I had to mimic it or imitate it. If anything, I think I was very focused on trying to understand it as best I could.”

Sonically, the album is not a major departure from the band's most recent records. sounds like a rich and mature version of Cage the Elephant. “I think despite the tumultuous weather this album came out rich musically,” he says. “Because I had to spend so much time re-acknowledging my reality, I didn't have much time to think about my influence. The influence is undeniable and ever present, but with this record I didn't have much time to spend on it and found us relaxing with our own musical style and voice. It was not only liberating but encouraging.”

With the album set, a brisk sell-out arena tour and aspirations of a Grammy threepeat on the horizon, this would normally be where the pressure starts to mount. But Shultz takes it all in stride. “As I said before, I don't have many expectations. “The way life has gone, it's a huge blessing,” he says. “I didn't know if I would make it. Last night we were on stage and I was singing “Trouble”. There's this line, “God, don't let me lose my mind.” And I was thinking, “Oh, wow. But I did.'”