Matt Shultz happily admits that Cage The Elephant is a long way from a retrospective record. “Our record label, RCA, called for the option of a greatest-hits release,” the frontman says of the band’s plans for a follow up to 2015’s Dan Auerbach-produced Tell Me I’m Pretty. “A greatest-hits record felt like the end of a career. We’re just starting, and we’re about to go into the best part of our lives, creatively.”

Instead, Cage The Elephant have issued their first live acoustic album, Unpeeled, which showcases the softer side of the Kentucky-born rockers. Recorded throughout their Live & Unpeeled tour, the unique concert souvenir pares the band’s festival-shaking, boisterous rock sound down in new and thoughtful ways, thanks to the addition of a string section (arranged by Cage guitarist Nick Bockrath) and backing vocalists. The inspiration for the tour came in 2016 after the group received an invitation to play Neil Young’s unplugged Bridge School Benefit Concert. Shultz recalls looking for a unique way to fill the sonic depths that have made band’s studio albums modern classics.

As he stripped down a decade’s worth of songs before the tour, Shultz was forced to take an intimate look at his catalog of original material. “It was a great experience to go back,” Shultz says. “We’ve had that, ‘ah-ha’ moment where we understand every little detail. It’s a piece to the whole communication element of the song that’s really important. It was a cool opportunity to take the songs that we wished were better and add that crown-molding.”

Though he’s known for his rowdy onstage antics, Shultz is actually quite reserved while dissecting the state of Cage The Elephant. He speaks thoughtfully and carefully as he traces the band’s growth, admitting that their first two records—2009’s self-titled debut and 2011’s Thank You Happy Birthday—sound more like a band “learning how to make records,” while 2015’s Melophobia “feels like the first album we made as a band.”

He touches on the preconceived notions the band had to unload while recording Melophobia. “You grow up and you get indoctrinated with this pop culture—you believe in the persona. You try to play out these characters and that’s just not real life,” he explains. The exercise of peeling back the track’s layers for their recent tour unlocked a previously unattainable creative process. “When I got rid of all that baggage, I got to the root of what art is. Art really is just communication. The more you can get to the bottom of that and make it potent, the more impactful the material’s going to be.”

Shultz speaks candidly about branching away from the “commerciality” that, at times, has hindered the band’s creative process. He’s also been able to observe how some of his friends and heroes handle their fame up close. Recently, Shultz has popped up on stages with Portugal. The Man (with whom he performed Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” at Bonnaroo), Incubus (for a tribute to Chris Cornell) and Prophets of Rage after an invite came from Tom Morello to join the band on MC5’s thrasher “Kick Out the Jams.”

“I didn’t know the lyrics,” Shultz admits. “While they were onstage, I just wrote the lyrics out 100 times on a piece of paper.”

Cage have welcomed their share of guests, too. As a now-famous tale goes, while on tour with the Foo Fighters in 2011, drummer Jared Champion’s appendix burst before a gig and Dave Grohl filled in for a spur-of-the-moment collaboration. It taught Shultz a lesson that he’s carried with him into Cage The Elephant’s second decade.

“I heard from his crew that he had gone on his bus and put our records on. He didn’t know our songs,” Shultz says. “He just crammed, like you were going to cram for a test. I just respect that so much. That’s one of the beautiful things about human beings—our ability to learn and become skillful.”

All of these experiences bled into Unpeeled’s creation. “We always dreamed big, but we just didn’t know how to bring it to fruition at that point,” Shultz says. “It was a great experience to go back and say, ‘When we wrote that [song] acoustically, we had big dreams for it— we just didn’t know how to do it.’ Now, with all the years of experience behind us, we were able to go back and execute [these songs] in a way that was more true to what we had originally hoped.”

Shultz sees the process as a validation of Cage’s growth, and lights up while describing the band’s next act. The ensemble spent the early part of July touring Europe as well as woodshedding through major festivals on both sides of the pond. And, throughout, they documented their travels for Relix. 

“Communication is key in the next phase of our career,” he gushes, noting that he hopes the band can embrace a number of new and old musical aesthetics down the road. “I get excited about electronic music, but I also get excited about styles of music that are ancient. I’m really excited, full of creativity.”