Cage the Elephant frontman Matt Shultz opens up regarding his 2023 arrest and his mental state leading up to it in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“It’s a miracle I’m alive,” he says.
As previously reported, Shultz was apprehended on gun charges in a New York City hotel in January 2023. Shultz tells Rolling Stone that, at the time of his arrest, he had been experiencing a psychosis for about three years brought on by medication.
“It was like being in an action film 24-7, but it’s always at the most dangerous and terrible part,” Shultz says of his experience, which was plagued by delusion and paranoia. “Or like a horror film, it was a nonstop horror film.”
Shultz describes his arrest as a “powerful attention-grabber” and says he “immediately checked into the hospital.”
“Those two months were a time period of starting to have good reality testing again, where I was starting to understand what the real world actually was,” he says.
Cage the Elephant will release their first album since Shultz’s arrest, Neon Pill, on Friday, May 17. Shultz started writing many of the songs on the album during his psychosis.
“Anyone who knows what psychosis is like knows how all-encompassing of an experience it is,” Shultz says. “Once I was getting on the other side of recovery, there was a good portion of time that had to be spent recrafting the lyrics and trying to understand the sentiment behind them.”
“After I’d gotten well again, things that meant something profound to me were no longer profound,” he continues. “It’s profoundly interesting. A lot of the lyrics had a very powerful meaning to me, but that meaning wasn’t based in reality.”
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