Sometimes we cater toward certain sounds or approaches or deliveries because that is what we think society at that particular time has deemed artistic and we totally lose sight of the fact that art is a form of expression. I can speak from my own personal experience that pride and fear are always the enemy when you’re creating. “Your mind recreates things that aren’t based so much on physical truth but more based on emotion. “I wanted the making of this music to be comparable to drawing your childhood house purely from memory,” continues Shultz. Throughout the process the musicians stopped listening to other musical recordings almost entirely and Matt Shultz drew songwriting inspiration from listening to those around him interact. Along with Joyce, the band focused on bringing each track to its greatest potential, which sometimes posed a significant challenge. The approach was highly experimental and based around the idea that that you don’t write a song, you find it. Charles Studio in Nashville over the winter and spring with longtime producer Jay Joyce. It was the uniting of several different ideas that were really different from each other.” The album, a varied collection of unabashedly vivid and notably thoughtful rock songs, was written and recorded over the course of a year, with various recording sessions taking place at St.
Once that came to light, the record really started taking shape on its own. We first started writing material that was very intimate and had a very kind of close and hushed sound to it, but our hearts missed that energy and swagger and playfulness we love so much. It really became a challenge to combine all these polar opposites together in a cohesive way. “As individuals we all had fairly vague visions for how we wanted the record to turn out,” lead singer Matt Shultz says. After touring for nearly five years straight on their prior releases, 2008’s Cage The Elephant and 2011’s Thank You, Happy Birthday, the musicians took some time off the road, to write as individuals before getting back together in August of 2012 to begin work on MELOPHOBIA as a collective. On Cage The Elephant’s third album, MELOPHOBIA, the rock band was faced with the challenge of finding cohesiveness in the ideas of five different people.