Kings Of Leon

It was only last Christmas that Clash declared ‘Because Of The Times’ by Kings Of Leon the best album of 2007. Now, only nine months later, its follow up, ‘Only By The Night’, looks set to rival its success. Clash flew once again to Nashville, Tennessee, to talk about this swift successor with everybody’s favourite royal family.

The fourth album from the Kings is immediately different. It signals in the band a massive transition away from the hard rockin’ edge so redolent in their first two albums, and to a degree in ‘Because Of The Times’, to subtler powers of persuasion through panoramic sounds, perfect melodies and profound lyrics. It’s a sound befitting a group who have matured from four garage rock darlings into a group of impressive stadium giants.

It’s an album infused with darkness – inspired by the self-doubt and questioning that comes with the loneliness of the wee small hours of the morning – but that doesn’t mean it’s all doom and gloom. Quite the opposite in fact. ‘Only By The Night’ finds the Kings more confident than ever, convinced (as are we) that they’ve surpassed themselves once more.

“To be in Kings Of Leon you’d need at least two STDs, a drinking problem, and a love of animals.”

So here we are in Nashville, in strikingly opposite climate conditions to our previous visit last January; having substituted the thick winter coat and snow-lined streets for shorts, flip-flops and searing August heat. Lovely. Retiring to the sanctuary of an air-conditioned bar downtown, Clash confronts the Followills and catches up on the band’s progression since last we met. As before, cousin Matthew sat silent throughout the interview, contrary to how animated he is whenever the recorder is turned off. Eldest brother Nathan is decidedly less talkative this time around, thus leaving the bulk of the action to younger brothers Caleb and Jared.

It’s a little over a year since ‘Because Of The Times’. Was it always the plan to follow it up so quickly?

Caleb: I don’t think we ever really have a schedule in mind. I think usually we just come off the road and it’ll come pretty quickly because we don’t really feel like… Y’know, we’re in Nashville where the scene isn’t so exciting to where you get lost in what’s going on and where you forget to make music, so we always try to make music. But I think on this one we had a little bit of pressure because of the success of the last one. We had a lot of festivals and big concerts and things calling to where we knew that if we were gonna go back and play these places we would wanna have some new songs and some new material to play. It ended up we finished the record – we didn’t realise we were gonna do it so quickly, but it came pretty quickly to us.

Where does the album title, ‘Only By The Night’, come from?

Jared: Edgar Allen Poe. We asked him what it should be…

Caleb: Actually, in his poem it says “only by night”, not ‘only by the night’. I had it memorised, but it was great. [Poe’s ‘Eleonora’ reads: “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night”.] It was talking about something like all these people that live in the daytime and they miss certain things that you can only find by the night.

Jared: It took us forever to come up with the album title. We had probably five or six that ended up in the shortlist, and we thought about it throughout the entire writing of the record, throughout the entire recording, and it was just something about our record…I mean, we kinda like night feeling stuff, you know, even stuff like vampires and The Lost Boys and cool stuff like that; we’re all into that, so there was just something about ‘Only By The Night’ that just felt edgy and what we thought this record felt like.

“At least with women you get the make-up sex aspect. To us, make-up sex was never an option.”

Do you have a clear idea who it is that’s listening to your music? Do you have anyone in mind? Are you writing for fifteen-year-old kids that you want to pick up a guitar?

Caleb: Well, you know, we don’t realise it, it’s getting to a level where things are changing, but fifteen-year-old kids are the ones that are commenting [on the Internet]. ‘That fucking sucks’, or ‘I can’t wait to marry him’ – it’s like all these things, but then you have the older fans, which are just fans of rock ‘n’ roll, fans of music; they’re usually the ones that point out every great thing about your music, and when the younger kids don’t realise what’s going on, they’re like, ‘Well hey, I’ve been listening to this kind of music for generations. You can’t come in here and hear one thing and dismiss the band as a good band because you don’t like what they’re saying or you can’t relate to what they’re saying’.

Do you think you are a forward-thinking band or are you more traditional?

Jared: We’re definitely not forward as far as technology and stuff like that…

Caleb: We’re still trying to catch up. I mean, we were so far behind the times as far as…you know, a lot of people, they start a band after they’ve been listening to Radiohead for ten years. We’ve only just listened to Radiohead for the last two or three years, and we’ve been working our way up the whole time, so I don’t think we’re forward at all. But due to the fact that we haven’t had the influences that everyone else has, there’s something about our music that people will feel is fresh; not fresh, it’s just that every trend that comes back around, we’re just slower than everyone else, so by the time we get somewhere it’s like, ‘oh shit, that’s cool!’

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The full version of this interview can be found in Issue 30 of Clash Magazine on sale now.