Kings of Leon
The Royal Family
Kings of Leon aim to build on their newfound glory

By Andy Argyrakis

Even though Kings of Leon have been in business since 1999, it wasn’t until the last few years that the rock ’n’ roll act became a household name. The quartet of brothers and a cousin from Nashville started off on the local club and bar scene. They quickly graduated to major festivals (like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza) and eventually caught the ear of U2, for whom the guys opened on a 2005 arena outing. The group’s steadily ascended the pop and rock charts thanks to singles like “Sex on Fire,” “Use Somebody” and “Notion,” all of which helped the band’s breakthrough CD Only By the Night sell over a million albums in America alone. This month finds the 2010 double Grammy Award winning group gearing up for a new CD, Come Around Sundown, which was finalized in the midst of a blockbuster summer tour that found the band graduating to major amphitheatres. Singer Caleb Followill and bassist Jared Followill spoke about the band’s surprising evolution during a recent teleconference conversation.

Now that you have had a chance to expand your audience to a wider level than just the indie scene, how do you feel like your music is connecting with the mainstream masses?
Caleb: That's a good question. I think it's definitely connecting with the mainstream audience more so than we ever thought that our music would, and some bands might look at that as a negative thing, but we see it as a very positive thing, and the fact that now we have a wider audience and a lot more people's attention, I think now the real test is to see if they want to continue on the journey with us and go where we want to go musically.

What scared you about achieving that level of popularity and did it turn out that any of the things you were scared about came to be?
Caleb: The thing that kind of scared us a little is what people's expectations would be, and we did get that. When we went on stage, at times, we're not having the best show, well, you can see it.  We wear our hearts on our sleeves and our attitudes and everything, and it got to a point where people are saying "well, I paid money to come see a good show and you come out here and you act a certain way." And that's how we've always been and you know, we are very passionate and we are trying to scale it back a little bit and not offend the people in the crowd. But for us, we're still a guitar band and we're still trying to play songs that we enjoy and hopefully the rest of the world will enjoy. But for the most part, I was scared to death when we got off the road, I thought we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without people recognizing us and stuff but somehow, some way, we've seemed to manage to get under the radar just enough to where we just made another album and people don’t really even realize it. So I don’t think that the things that we were scared about have necessarily come to pass just yet, but we'll see when we start the tour, how young the people are.

Can you tell us the best part of touring?  What do you enjoy most?
Jared: I don’t know, it gets better and better with each tour, and we really don’t have much to complain about now. You know, we started in a van, all four of us, and our two crew members all living together basically in a van. It just gets a little bit better with each tour, and we were sharing hotels or sharing motels. And so I would say the best part of touring now is just the ease and the comfort; it’s easier than being at home, and you don’t really have to worry about anything. Everybody tells you where to go and what time to be there, and if you don’t get there on time, they wake you up and they'll come carry you if your legs hurt and all kinds of fun stuff. So it's just the ease of not having any responsibility except for being on stage.
Caleb: Except for being good at music.

How you react to the claim that you guys are the next big arena band and you are taking over like U2 and Coldplay? 
Caleb: I don’t know, man. We never expected to – once we got to the level that we are right now, we don’t necessarily wake up every day expecting for everything to be the way that it is forever. And some of those bands like U2, they kind of mapped out what it was to be that arena band, and to hold on to that status and to be honest. All of us are wanting to hold on to that status, unless it means that we can do exactly what we want to do musically. And also, I just hope that everyone that comes to see us, they realize that we are still young and we're still trying to find ourselves as people, as a band, and I don’t want people's expectations to get too high. And I think that they are coming out there to watch a professional band that never has a day off and never has a moment that they are not completely confident. We are still learning as a band and growing as a band and hell, if we are playing arenas, you know five years from now, or three years from now or two, whatever, it will be – we'll be thrilled but you know, just so long as we don’t have to do anything in the process to make us feel like we've gone too far, you know?

Some of the internet gossip has been describing the new album as a fun or beachy record. I was wondering if you could go into a little more detail describing what the new album sounds like and how it compares to your past albums?
Caleb: There are definitely times when it’s very tropical and beachy, but there is always that dark chord in there that makes it Kings of Leon. But we have actually done some things on this album that we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I truly feel like with each album, we are getting closer to what it is that we want to do as a band. This album, we have fiddle on this album and we have lap steel on this album, trumpet, and all kinds of stuff. We are really trying to make these songs live up to what it is that we want them to be, so there are a lot of elements that you may have never heard on Kings of Leon. But there are also a lot of elements that were on the early Kings of Leon demos. I mean from day one, these are things that we’ve been kind of doing, but we’ve always held back a little bit. And you know, I’m going for it vocally, we are all going for it. We will see what people think, but we are very proud of it. Everyone always says it’s the best thing that they have done, but we truly feel like it’s one of the better things that we have done. It’s at least in the top five of our albums.
Jared: Pitchfork is going to love it.

Who do you see as the band’s audience these days?
Caleb: It's pretty crazy, actually, when you look at it. We have little bitty kids, we have middle-aged people, and we have older people. The front row is always a crazy thing because it's all these different people from different generations – different backgrounds. And it's been pretty special seeing how it's gone. If we continue doing what we want to do musically and we throw people for a loop at times, I'm very interested to see who all sticks around and who all is going to be there for the whole career. But, it's actually a lot of fun. I get a real kick out of it every night when we go there and you look and you see a little kid and it's like, "man, that little kid –  we're inspiring that kid to play music or to listen to music." And then you see the older people and it's like we're reminding them of what they loved about music when they were younger. So, it's pretty amazing and we're very blessed; and we get to see some strange things on stage; and we get to, hopefully, inspire people that may have lost hope in music; and people that maybe didn't know what music was really about.

Tell me about the Nashville floods and how you have tried to help out, and how that situation affected you directly or indirectly.
Caleb: We're trying to put a little benefit concert together. Nashville is obviously a country music town so, when it happened, initially, there were a lot of big country music concerts that were getting planned. And we wanted to something that was a little more underground. And so, when we do get the opportunity to play a concert, we want it be on a different level musically; we want to have a lot of cool bands play. If we get the opportunity to do this the way that we want to do it, we want to do it, obviously, for Nashville – but we also want to take a different approach as to how people do it here. And as far as what's affected us – I have a house that got, kind of, destroyed. My older brother had a big landslide at his place, so he's got a bunch of stuff to deal with.
Jared: I live on top of a mountain, so I was fine…Yes, we've all personally helped out as much as we could. You don't really need to talk about it or whatever, but we've all done what we could, with us being multi-thousandaires now.