Watch Cage the Elephant Rock Out in an Empty Bathroom
Last month, in the second installment of our “Journeys” video series, Cage the Elephant took us back to their early days, joking about their unusual name and explaining how they got started. “I don’t think we ever really thought of it as a career or like we’d have a career in it,” said Brad Shultz, the band’s guitarist. “We were doing it just because there was nothing else to do.”
Of course, his brother Matt, the band’s lead vocalist, had a different take: “I always wanted something to happen” he interrupted. “When I was in high school, I went and saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers in an arena, and I sat there and I watched them play and I cried. I was like, ‘I wanna do that someday!'”
A decade and a half later, the Shultz brothers are doing exactly that. After opening arenas for the Black Keys, the band will soon return to the road, playing a series of holiday mega-concerts with bands like Imagine Dragons, Weezer and Alt-J. Here, however, watch a “Journeys” outtake that finds Matt Shultz playing almost by himself, singing an acoustic “Cigarette Daydreams” in an empty bathroom. Shultz’s long hair hangs down over his face for much of the song, but lines like “You can drive all night looking for answers in the pouring rain” sound marvelously full echoing off the tiled walls.