Kings of Leon

Kings of Leon unwind with cases of wine and their most complete record yet

It’s not often that the way an interview ends tells you more about an artist an actual question. Except for when someone gets socked in the face, of course. That’s not exactly what happens when we cornered Kings of Leon drummer, Nathan Followill, for 45 minutes in his Nashville home. He does, however, choose to curtail our conversation because it’s Nathan’s turn to get a haircut from Mama Followill in the kitchen. (She just finished shearing the long locks of brother/Kings frontman Caleb.) Which immediately makes us stop and quietly muse, “This dude isn’t kidding about being a down home country boy, is he?” You see, speculation over Kings of Leon’s “story” has dogged the quartet—comprised of three brothers (Caleb, Nathan and bassist Jared) and one first cousin (lead guitarist Matthew)—since their acclaimed debut album, 2003’s Youth & Young Manhood.

The plot in a paragraph: Three brothers get brought up on the road by an evangelist father who rocks tent revivals the same way the boys would later rock arenas. Somewhere along the way, said evangelist father gets stripped of his preaching license after hitting the bottle too hard. Boys suddenly become men as their sheltered world is blown wide open by their first exposure to rock ‘n’ roll and pop culture outside of the occasional gospel record. A few years later, said men evolve into “saviors of rock” icons celebrated by everyone from Bob Dylan to Mick Jagger.

All of which makes Kings of Leon an easy target for puff pieces and journalists seeking “the truth” … even if it means scraping someone’s mouth for DNA. Good thing the new Kings album, Because of the Times, is too solid to be written off as a novelty act, then.

So what’s the press reaction been like this time around? Have people still been asking you the same questions about your upbringing as the sons of a minister?

It’s a lot better. One out of every five leads to retelling the story, but lately everyone has been all about discrediting the fact that we are all related. One publication wanted to do swabs of our mouths to check the DNA.

Are you serious? You should have played right along to make them look bad.

We were going to let random fans do it actually, like Japanese midgets and such; not that Japanese midgets come to our shows, but you know what I mean.

The obsession over your past has always been a bit creepy and invasive, don’t you think?

Oh man, they went crazy this time, too. Part of it makes me want to be like, “F*** you, you’re messing with my personal life, calling people I haven’t talked to in 10 years just to get your story right.” We had one magazine do the whole thing—go to the town where we live and interview everyone there from the church committee to any semblance of our family. They ran this huge five-page story discrediting us, and then on the last line, they were like, “We got in touch with blah, blah, blah and their story is actually true.”

You must get some sick satisfaction out of that, though.

It’ll be great in five years when everyone realizes we really aren’t related.

You know, one of the reasons your story seems to check out is the fact that you weren’t exposed to rock ‘n’ roll until a later age, which in turn must have made you appreciate it more, made you devour records.

Totally. It floored us. Since we discovered it so late in life, our minds weren’t polluted with all the s*** that came before and after all the greatness. It was like we were given a Greatest Hits of rock ‘n’ roll’s history.

Since journalists seem to be regurgitating your personal story over and over again, tell us something we don’t know about you or Kings of Leon.

I don’t know. The least rock ‘n’ roll thing about us is probably that me and Caleb are avid golfers.

And who wins most of the time?

I pretty much crush him every time, although our cousin/guitar tech roadie Nacho beats me every time too. So it’s a good food chain, there.

What’s your favorite course?

There’s one in Valencia, Spain that I absolutely love. I’ve played on so many beautiful courses that it’s hard to pick just one, really.

And your best score ever?

Probably an 80, which is pretty good for me.

Did you play golf when you were kids at all or did you just start recently?

We started about three years ago. It’s good exercise and nice to be outside. Of course, you can also smoke weed, get piss drunk and still be accepted. There’s not too many sports like that.

Traveling in general, whether it’s touring now or the way you were on the road with your father as kids, must have made a major impact on your music and the way you’ve grown up.

Yeah, man. It seemed like a pain in the ass sometimes—never being able to settle down and make friends since we were never in the same place for too long. But then we meet kids who have lived in the same town their whole life and they’re completely fascinated by us. So we’ve grown to appreciate the fact that while we may have spent most of our childhood in the back of a car, we still got to experience America and things most people don’t get to see. It also definitely prepared us for touring because we’d be in a different city every week.

Did you grow to like certain areas of the country?

My mom’s family lived in Tennessee and my dad lived in Oklahoma, so we loved to visit her and do something normal once in a while.

Are you still living with Caleb?

Yeah, me, Caleb and Nacho are welded together. We actually just bought three farms and our first tractor. I don’t know; we like to live a totally different life when we’re off the road. You’ve got to be able to separate the two. Otherwise it’ll get to your head. It’s kinda good to come home and wear normal pants instead of skintight ones, so no one looks at you funny at Wal-Mart. All of our friends have moved to New York or L.A., and that works for them, but we’re stay at home/eat mom’s food kind of guys.

Well, you’d get burned out if you toured for six months and then came home to a busy city like New York, where you’re enticed to go out every night.

Oh yeah. I like to buy six or eight bottles of wine, put on my pajamas, sit on the couch and not do anything for two or three days. That way you can re-adapt because it’s a mind-f*** otherwise—doing one thing for so long and then having it taken away.

Are you planning on growing anything out there?

Our cousin is going to be our ranch hand and live in one of the houses. We’ve planted a garden so far and plan on building a proper barn in the middle of the woods soon.

What about a proper golf course?

There’s gonna be two holes side by side so you can play back and forth, a pond full of bass, a dune buggy—all that.

Before you know it, you’ll be on MTV Cribs.

I know, but I’ll have to borrow some of my friends’ fancy cars for that.

Do the other two dudes in the band still live on one floor of your mom’s house?

Jared and Matt have condos side by side now, about 15 minutes from our townhouse so we wouldn’t get DUIs driving out to the farm.

Did you do all of the rehearsing and writing for this record at home like the last one?

Yeah. We did all of the preparations for this in our garage.

How much of the actual recording was done live this time?

We went in there not wanting to do a live record, but we still did about 75 percent of it live because we like the feel of it. Every song but about three ended up being the original tracks. If it feels good, it feels good, whether it’s the first take or the hundredth.

How did “Knocked Out” come together? It’s certainly a departure for you guys.

It wasn’t supposed to be that long. We were just playing it and trying to get a good fadeout. You can actually hear a door slam if you listen closely, which was when the producer came in and said, “Keep going and ride it out.”

Yeah, it sounds like the kind of thing where you found a groove and ran with it.

Totally, like being on the train tracks and staying between the lines. This was the first record where we knew what we wanted to get out of it, as opposed to going in there with our fingers crossed. We all had a part in every song on this record. You don’t realize how attached you can get to a song until you’ve heard it 200 times. It becomes real to you then. Which makes me wonder how producers are able to move onto something else so quickly. That’s like building a house, painting it, moving the furniture in and then, right before you turn the TV on, you go build another house.

So this was the first time you all felt personally invested in the process, right?

Yes. Caleb still does the majority of the lyrics, but this was the first record where lyrics were not the only part of writing songs. We wrote some of these songs around guitar parts, drum beats, basslines or Caleb whistling the same melody for three weeks. We always try to keep things creative and fresh because once you get jaded, it isn’t fun for anyone.

Going back to the issue of the rampant press behind you guys, has the UK changed the way they regard your records yet? In the beginning, they seemed focused more on your story than your actual music.

It’s all about the music now. I think they could see us going in a different direction with the last record, where we weren’t going to just be these “country boys” anymore.

Well, you’ve essentially grown up before their eyes over there.

Yeah, we’re very pleased with the response we’ve gotten there and are proud that we can go over there with such a strong record—a great representation of how much we’ve grown physically, emotionally, mentally… all that s***.

You music sounds inherently “American,” so were you surprised that the UK and Europe has picked up on it more than the US?

I think four hairy boys from the South sounds more appealing to someone in England than it does to someone in New York.

Because you seem exotic to them?

Totally—from our story to the way we sound and look. It was a publicist’s wet dream, for sure.

Did it bum you out that your music was getting lost in that story?

Man, we were pretty wild, so out of it that nothing bothered us.

You’re a little more mature now though, right?

Yeah, we matured on the last one, so now it’s time to get downright immature again.

This entry was posted by RNYK on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 10:12 am