Cage the Elephant follows music to fame

At the end of a 15-minute interview, Brad Shultz of Cage the Elephant says six magic words: “Actually, you know, there’s a funny story.” It seems the Bowling Green, Ky., rock band was performing at Lollapalooza in Chicago in 2014 and Shultz’s father, Brad Sr., was wielding his camera as usual in the photo pit beneath the stage. The band played 2013’s soft-spoken “Cigarette Daydreams,” about a 17-year-old with a mean streak that “nearly brought me to my knees,” and the senior Shultz became visibly emotional.

“I turn around and my dad is just, like, tears streaming down his face,” the band’s guitarist, Shultz Jr., recalls, from his Nashville home. “And I had to turn around, because I started crying — I had to turn to the drums and have a little cry.”

Shultz, 34, doesn’t have time to elaborate as his phone time runs out, other than to say father and son both laughed about the moment later. But both song and crying story may refer to a difficult period in his family upbringing. For a while, when Shultz and his brother, Cage the Elephant singer Matt Shultz, were very young, their parents reportedly raised them in a religious compound. The Shultzes don’t talk about this much publicly, but Brad suggests the family’s strictness had an effect on the young future musicians.

“There was a period when my parents were very religious. They were trying to do their best for us, like every other parent,” the guitarist says. “They would keep us away from a lot of newer music from that time, but we were still exposed to it. They didn’t want us listening to, like, ’60s and ’70s rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a little ironic to me, because I’m sure their parents did the same thing to them. But they were always supportive of our music.”

Cage the Elephant, best known for alternative-rock hits like “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” and “Trouble,” formed in 2006 with bassist Daniel Tichenor and drummer Jared Champion (and guitarist Lincoln Parish, who has since left) and put out their first single a year later.

Unusually, their first album, 2009’s “Cage the Elephant,” came out in England, and the band relocated from Bowling Green to London to follow the music. They didn’t blow up like they expected, so they moved again two years later, this time for good, to Nashville. All the while, they were developing a reputation as an aggressive, spontaneous live band.

When making their fourth studio album, last year’s “Tell Me I’m Pretty,” they decided to collaborate with a new producer, the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who helped them simplify. Writing songs together, as usual, the band was inspired by Western movies the Shultzes had grown up watching.

“We really fell in love with the spaghetti Western sound and some of the music in those old movies and soundtracks,” Brad Shultz says. “We wanted to do a rough-around-the-edges version of that — of course, every record, we always formulate ideas from the start and they turn into something of their own.”