The tidal wave of fame brought on by the Kings of Leon’s fourth album Only By The Night has just this past few months spawned millions of new fans who know relatively little about this 10-year-old Nashville rock band. Sure, you probably know all the words to “Sex On Fire” and you’ve probably heard the story of the band’s upbringing by their Pentecostal preacher dad, but do you know that the Followills — brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared and cousin Matthew — have purposely given each of their album titles exactly five syllables? Or that Caleb doesn’t really recall writing the band’s biggest hit because he was on painkillers? Read on for more details on today’s hottest rock band.
1) Their Biggest Hit Almost Wasn’t.
If you hadn’t heard of Kings of Leon before this year, you sure got a healthy heaping of them in ’09 when their now-ubiquitous hit “Sex On Fire” took off and blew the lid off their modest fame. But that star-making song almost didn’t happen, explains frontman Caleb. “We were all arguing [about that song],” he says. “I wanted to get rid of it, and now it’s the biggest song we’ve ever had. It shows how much I know.”
2) Their Famous Conquests Have Led to … Serious Monogamy.
Despite having famously romanced more than a few groupies and even one famous supermodel (their 2004 song “Soft” is reportedly about Caleb’s drugged-out affair with Kate Moss), each of the Kings has been attached to his respective girlfriend for two years or so. Caleb dates model Lily Aldridge (who made a cameo in the band’s “Use Somebody” video), while Nathan is attached at the hip to fiancée Jessie Baylin, a singer-songwriter who shares his Nashville digs. Matthew and Jared, meanwhile, have made it last with longtime girlfriends Johanna Bennett and Alicia Torres.
3) They’re Gibson and Epiphone Devotees. (But Watch Out for Temper Tantrums!)
“The only guitar I use is an Epiphone Sheraton and that I play through a 2 X 12” Ampeg Reverberocket,” says guitarist Matthew. “I use the Sheraton so much because it is a hollow body guitar and I get a lot of great feedback from it. Because a lot of our songs now use feedback, I can’t get the feedback that I like from the Sheraton with the other guitar or any other guitar. The Sheraton doesn’t give you that shrill feedback, it kind of gives you that nice humming feedback.” Bass player Jared, too, favors the Gibson sound, playing a Thunderbird and a ’68 EB-0. Caleb’s No.1 guitar is his vintage Gibson ES-325, which he recently smashed during a performance over in Europe. Gibson’s Repair & Restoration department has since lovingly repaired the guitar and returned it to its owner.
4) Breaking Up or Just Brawlin’?
Speaking of that smashed-up ES-325, the aftermath of the concert in which the smashing took place is said to have included a serious backstage brawl between the family members. But that’s old news; the press has long reported on the brothers’ whiskey-fueled dust-ups. Fans aren’t to worry about the break-up rumors that invariably follow such reports. Just last week Nathan wrote the following on his Twitter page: “No one in the band is feuding over royalties. No one is quitting the band. We are excited to take a break and get back in the studio soon.”
5) They’ve Got Friends In High Places.
They might be from the country, but the Kings wasted no time making plenty of glitzy, big-city friends. Liv Tyler, Drew Barrymore and the Olsen Twins have been hangers-on for years, and the boys are increasingly getting in good with the young Hollywood crowd, barhopping with the stars of Twilight and High School Musical.
6) They Have a Love/Hate Relationship with Their Hometown.
These Nashville-bred boys have stayed loyal to their hometown, even when their hometown hasn’t returned the favor. With local alternative weekly Nashville Scene skewering the band every chance it gets and some early industry chatter that the band was too pre-fabricated to take seriously, the Kings have nursed some bruised egos while still calling Music City home. That was most evident at the band’s Nashville show on Oct. 16, when Caleb rejoiced in being home but said also, “We take a lot of s**** from a lot of people in Nashville … I just hope that people who say those things about us, they know how hard we’ve worked, and how hard we still work.”
7) Booze Begets The Best Songs.
The Followills are notoriously boozy, with their handlers even doling out shots mid-show, but they also insist that alcohol has lubricated the creation of some of their biggest hits. In fact, Caleb wrote most all the songs for Only By The Night while under the influence of alcohol and painkillers following shoulder surgery. Last year Caleb told The Village Voice, “After I’ve had a few drinks and I have a songbook in front of me, a lot of times I'll kind of talk to myself a little bit, you know, and kind of point a finger at myself, and usually that’s the most emotion that comes out of me. I mean, I'm going to open up one way or the other, but I think it just happens a little quicker when you have something altering you to give you the confidence to do so.”
8) Every KOL Album Title Has 5 Syllables.
KOL’s album titles have always seemed to be inexplicably similar, and it all boils down to their syllabic structure. It’s no coincidence that each of their album titles is five syllables long. “It just so happened that the first, well,
Youth and Young Manhood, we didn’t think about it like that,” Caleb has said. “And
Aha Shake Heartbreak, as soon as we knew it was going to be
Aha Shake Heartbreak, my little brother said, ‘Okay. Well, the next one has to be
Because of the Times.’ And that was years ago. And then one day someone did the math and it was like, ‘Wow, everything’s five syllables. We want to stick with that.’ And that was actually the toughest part of this album … Like, ‘What are we going to call the record?’ Because we had all these great titles, but none of them were five syllables.” Finally the band settled
On Only By The Night. The formula seems to have worked.