Kings of Leon on fire

(Credit: LEGO)

Caleb Followill, lead singer of Tennessee rockers Kings of Leon, is not shy about his band’s ambitions.

“I feel as though we’re going to end up doing something really big,” he says, just days before the release of the group’s fourth album, “Only by the Night.” “I’m ready to make our mark.”

Those remarks now seem prophetic. Since Metromix's conversation with Followill, the family foursome—three brothers and one cousin—have won their first Grammy, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, and sold over two million copies of “Only by the Night” worldwide. This summer, they'll headline Lollapalooza alongside the likes of the Beastie Boys, Tool and Jane's Addiction. Not bad for a band the ever-snide critics at Pitchfork recently dismissed by dubbing their increasingly U2-like sound, “Y’all2.”

Caleb Followill reads the band’s press, including the negatives, but remains undeterred. The way he sees it, “Only by the Night” is just the sound of a band growing into itself, and if some people don’t get it, that’s fine by him—so long as the radio keeps playing more Kings of Leon songs.

Is it true that you wrote many of the songs on “Only by the Night” while you were under the influence of painkillers?
Yeah, that’s kind of gotten around, hasn’t it? Most people take it the wrong way and think it was, like, this joyride. But no, it was quite boring. Writing songs actually got me through the mundane schedule of the pills that I had to take.

You guys have graduated to playing much bigger venues now. Has that influenced the way you write and arrange your songs?
It just kind of changed the way that we work, I would say. We’re a band, just like everyone else, who has kind of dreamed about this our whole lives. And so now that the chances are getting bigger and getting closer—we’re trying to skip as much of the process as possible and go ahead and get there. I dunno; it’s not that we’re aiming for something that’s completely huge and out of our league. But we’re really trying to get good music on the radio again.

That seems like a noble cause to take up.
If we have to make millions in the process, we’ll do it. [Laughs]

There was a story about you guys in Blender awhile back; on the cover it said, “Our Seven-Day Bender with Kings of Leon.” Do you guys really drink that much?
I don’t know. We definitely do our fair share of drinking. I think that’s just the way our family is; it’s just in our genes. Some might call it an accomplishment; some might call it a disease. [But] that [Blender article] was done when we were at home, and when you’re home, you know—we work so much and we’re never home, so when we’re home, it’s party time.

So it’s more of a leisure time activity? You’re not passing a bottle of Jack around onstage like Drive-By Truckers?
We have our own bottles of something. I do Jameson’s, Matthew’s on vodka, Nathan—I think Nathan, he’s either drinking beers or he drinks wine onstage. And my little brother [Jared], he’s either on chardonnay or Red Bull/vodka. We don’t share that much.

I read an interview where you talked about how you wanted the lyrics and your singing style to be more direct on this album—that you kind of deliberately mumbled sometimes on the previous albums because you didn’t always want people to understand the words.
Yeah, I guess so. I think I’m just right now, at this point in my life, confident enough to do it. And I thought the material was really strong and the melodies were really strong—and I didn’t want to be the one that, you know, fucked it up. It felt like everything was coming together and if there was ever a time when I was gonna kind of pull my ego out of it and say, “Look, man, go in there and try and give 110 percent. Quit worrying about if people are gonna think you’re cool or not.” And so, you know, I did it. And all along I knew that this could be the only time I ever did it and if people really hated it and we lost a lot of fans from it—well then, you know, I could always go back to mumbling. But it’s very liberating, actually, finally stepping out there and belting out the way that I can.

Do you read your reviews, good and bad?
Yeah, you know, you can’t help but read certain things. But since our first record, this is the first one I’ve seen that not everyone agrees, and not everyone sees eye-to-eye on what it is about the record that they like or dislike. But it seems to be the one that’s bringing us the most success. So it’s like, what do you want: do you want to be critical darlings that still don’t sell records, or do you want to take over the world and have not everyone like what you’re doing? I mean, at the end of the day, if we could in some way be an example of what America’s bringing to the table musically, God bless it. I don’t care what people say. As long as we can get Nickelback and Jonas Brothers and Avril Lavigne and all that shit off the radio, it’s like, alright—we’ll take it.