Kings of Leon New album, same long hair
When Kings of Leon pitched up in 2003, a lot of people were seduced by the story of how they grew up on the back seat of an old car being driven around the Deep South by their travelling preacher of a dad - but no one thought they had even two good albums in them. This April, they dropped their third, Because of the Times, and it’s a belter – far grander than its predecessors and a conscious move forwards from their signature country-punk sound, but just as rough-cut and explosive. Recent months have seen them supporting some of the world’s biggest artists and it’s given them an idea of what it looks like from the top of the rock’n’roll pile. That, it seems, is what they seek. But you also sense that these three brothers and a cousin from Tennessee are too honest musically to reach there any time soon, and probably too good-natured as well.
HUCK: Your new record has a much bigger, almost stadium rock sound. Is it influenced by the fact you’ve been playing these humongous shows supporting Dylan, U2 and Pearl Jam?
Nathan: When we were on tour with U2 we were writing and getting a lot of these ideas, and we were playing huge arenas every night. Even at soundcheck we would be thinking how the new songs would work in a big place like that. This record was definitely written with that in mind – that the stuff would sound good in a 300-person sweatbox and a 20,000-seat arena.
Did you get to hang out with Dylan when you were on tour with him?
Caleb: We didn’t really expect to, because no one really talks to him or anything – he just kinda does his thing – but we were only doing one leg of the tour and at the end he came back there and he sounded like a little old black man. He said: [Adopts half-hipster, half-wheezy accent] “Man, I’m depressed.” And we were like, “Really?” “Yeah, I told ‘em we should just tell them other two bands to stay home, we want you guys to finish it off.” And then he’s like, “W’as that last song you played?” I said, “Trani,” and he said, “That’s a hell of a song.” I hit the floor.
There’s always been a lot of talk about how Kings of Leon broke big in the UK but struggled in America. Is it different now you’ve played so many big shows there?
Caleb: Yeah, it’s really picked up in America.
Nathan: You won’t see it in record sales, but we’re playing places in towns that are four times the size of the last place we played there.
Caleb: A good thing for us is that we can pretty much play in front of about 3,000 people all over the world. In some places we can play to more, but when we first started the band the thought of playing to even half that number in America was like, ‘Fuck!’
Did you have a good time recording the new album?
Caleb: Definitely. We did most of it in Nashville and it wasn’t like we were going in there and working – first half of the days we’d be playing around outside and drinking these little foofie pineapple Malibu drinks and then when it was time to go into the big session we’d pour a couple glasses of wine. It was the best studio, man – you could change the colour of the room to whatever you wanted. Say with a song like ‘Arizona’, we’d make it pink and purple in there, or with a song like ‘Charmer’, we’d make it a harsh red. We got to play around with stuff like that and that made the vibe come out so much.
Nathan: It was the middle of the summer too and it was really sunny outside. As close to Hawaii as Nashville’s gonna get.
Caleb: And all these country musicians were recording there – all these people like Faith Hill and Keith Urban – and they’d come pulling into their sessions and we’d be all out there with no shirts on, laying out with a drink and bouncing balls off their Bentleys.
The songwriter Angelo didn’t play any part in your new songs. Is that right?
Caleb: That’s right.
But he co-wrote all the songs on the first record?
Caleb: Yeah.
In the UK that raised a fair bit of suspicion, but is that the norm in Nashville – for songwriters to work together?
Caleb: We had written songs with a lot of people in town. That’s what we were doing – just trying to write some songs and make some money.
Nathan: We had a friend who was in Nashville and they paid him, like, $2,000 for a cheesy thing that you could spit out and we were like, “Holy shit.”
Caleb: We were waiters at a restaurant and we hated it, so we’d go and write with people, but we never wrote anything cheesy enough for people to actually record and we didn’t want to be like, “Here you go, this is bullshit.” But we would watch people and work with people and we realised how terribly clichéd those songs were. Finally we had a meeting with Angelo and he was cool. Instead of sitting around writing, we would sit around listening to records and smoking pot. We built our relationship from there. There’s a lot of misconception in what people think of our writing relationship – it’s not what they think. In the beginning, at the beginning only, before I was confident, he was pretty much a guy to bounce ideas off – a mentor. Now he’s pretty much a producer and we still bounce ideas off him in the studio. Ethan Jones is behind the boards and Angelo’s there with two middle fingers up saying, “Come on, motherfuckers, pump me up!” He’s always been the one that, when I’m sitting there thinking I don’t know if it’s cool, he’s saying, “Fuck you, if you’re doing it, it’s cool. Don’t fucking worry about what people are thinking.” He helped make us confident.
Will you carry on working with him on future records?
Caleb: I’m always gonna want him to be one of the first people to hear it, because I can tell when I look at him if we’re on the right path or if we fucked up and have gone astray. But I don’t know if we’ll always work with him and Ethan. With this record, we weren’t gonna use them, because we were making a bigger record. We met with other producers but it just felt gross – like a blind date. They said whatever we wanted them to say. There was no heart in it. Angelo and Ethan aren’t that way – they’re just completely honest. I’ve been nose to nose with both of those guys thinking we’re about to fight because we’re so passionate about it.
Your second record was cut almost live. Was this done the same way?
Caleb: We went in there saying we’re not gonna record another live record. We loved Aha Shake Heartbreak because it was raw and natural but after we heard it played in clubs next to another song that was produced, we were kinda like, “Eeeeh.” But then we accidentally went into the studio and pretty much recorded another live record. We didn’t mean to – we would go in there and be like, “Everyone just jam along and we’re gonna get the drum track,” and then we’d listen to it and realise that all we had to do was throw some backing vocals on there and fix the guitar solo, maybe get a different guitar sound... You can still hear things that are so live – you can hear doors closing.
Lyrically, do you think you’ve developed between this and the last record?
Caleb: Yeah, you have to – you have to be able to grow and stuff like that, and in a lot of different ways. A lot of the growth, I think, is that I’m electing to go with simple things. Simple things are what stick in my head – all those old Walt Disney songs and things like that. It doesn’t all have to be about your dick, it doesn’t have to be about sex or something complicated – you can absolutely go out there and say something simple. Pink Floyd used to say simple stuff. It didn’t sound simple but it was.
So you’re not going to be so embarrassed when your mum is listening to this one. Didn’t she get upset with the last one?
Caleb: [Laughs] I tried not to cuss at all on this record. I say ‘asshole’ but I think that’s it. I'm not sure if the radio will like that.
When you started out, plenty of things were written about your dad that were unsubstantiated. Did it piss you off that your upbringing was questioned?
Caleb: Absolutely. We never thought that people would think it was such a weird thing. I mean, there are a lot of preachers’ kids in America. We didn’t realise that in the UK and Europe it’s not so Christian-based. For us it was just, “Yeah, we were in the back of a car because our dad was a preacher and we were poor.” There are preachers’ kids that don’t have to ride in the back of the car – they have nice trailers and things – but that’s just how it was for us. It was one of those things, though, that when we told people, they were immediately like, “What!?” and the record company people were like, “What!?” and the publicist... So then we’d do an interview and people would bring it up and we would go, “Yeah, what about it?” and then, before you knew it, that’s all they would talk about and we were like, “For fuck’s sake. Do you like the music?”
Nathan: The worst part was my dad reading stuff that bad-mouthed him...
Caleb: That he was a drunken preacher and did drugs...
Nathan:...and half the time we never said anything. They just took a little bit like, “Their dad left the church for drinking,” or whatever, and then they’d make up that he was kicked out, and was the shame of the family... that was the hardest thing.
Was it a tough childhood? It must have been hard to maintain friendships if you were always moving about.
Nathan: You couldn’t. That’s why people can’t believe how good we get along. Most people, you stick them in their room with their brother and they’re killing each other.
Caleb: We had friends, but everything happened very quickly. We knew, after a while, that we shouldn’t get too close to people because we knew they were gonna be gone. You’d go to different churches and if there was a girl you liked, there wasn’t much you could do. It wasn’t like you were at home and you could call her or whatever – we were on the road. So you’d just hope you’d run into her at a church conference or something like that...
Nathan:...and re-kindle your making-out relationship.
Has it made you all emotionally very hard?
Caleb: Yeah, but we’re all good-hearted guys. At Christmas time, we want to have a girl that we’re actually serious with. It never happens, though. It does for Jared and Nathan, but I’m not very good at that, and I don’t like buying people presents [laughs].
Nathan: Caleb will always ask a girl out the day after Christmas and break up with her the day before Valentine’s Day. That’s usually his prime time to get a girlfriend.
You spent so much time in church when you were younger. Did it teach you what other kids who went to loads of punk shows learnt – that emotion and energy are more important than skill.
Nathan: Oh yeah. At some churches we went to, the drummer was the only guy there who could keep a beat and that’s why he became the drummer. It was always about people playing together good and never about great musicians all playing badly on the stage at the same time. Four or five people that aren’t that good can play together and produce something that’s amazing if they listen to each other and are honest.
Are your ambitions for this record any different than before?
Caleb: You think of record sales and things like that, but we know we’re not going to sell millions of records, unless something happens. I mean, people don’t really sell millions of records anymore - it’s really hard to do it. With that being said, we went in there trying to write bigger and better songs, not just to get people but because we weren’t always thrilled that our music was always so dumbed down.
Kings of Leon’s new album, Because of the Times
This story originally appeared in Huck #005.
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