Interview: Kings Of Leon

By Kevin Yeoh  •  in Features
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Kings of Leon have established themselves as one of the most influential bands of our time, with the band’s ‘Sex On Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ becoming anthems for the young generation. The brothers and cousin are back with their 5th effort Come Around Sundown after the successful Only By The Night, which garnered 4 Grammy Awards. Returning to their mellow Southern rock roots, it’s a more chilled out album that’s part beach-feel and entirely feel-good. The boys talk to JUICE about the amazing new record.

THE ALBUM TITLE
Jared Some people interpret it as “Come around sundown,” like “Come over my house at sundown.” I don’t see it as that. I see it as “Come around sundown, we ’bout to get down.” Haha!

RECORDING PROCESS
Caleb There’s a lot of vulnerability on this record and it’s the fact that a lot of it wasn’t rehearsed and, I mean, back when people were making real music, that’s what you loved: when you could hear a pop here, a crack here or a door opening. And I remember when we were doing Youth And Young Manhood, I forget which track it is, but if you listen closely-and we’re probably the only ones that can hear it-you can hear someone playing pool in the background. You can hear the balls cracking.

‘RADIOACTIVE’
Nathan To be able to put a song on a record that was written 2 records ago, but for some reason just didn’t quite fit, says a lot about the strength of the songs.
Caleb Yeah, it started out as a very punk rock song that we ended up scrapping. We ended up using that melody for the new idea, which was that “boom-de-da-deh”. But when we got in there, the verse and chorus were too similar. It didn’t feel like it went anywhere.
Jared We had to completely restructure the song. And that’s what we did going into this record. We just thought, we’re not going to throw away a song; we’re going to make every song as good as possible.

‘PYRO’
Caleb I had actually written some verses because I was watching this piece on these radical Christians that live up in the mountains, and somehow the FBI got involved and pretty much went and killed them. And so I started writing about that and about a guy that was kind of fed up with it all, and he thought that the world that he was living in wasn’t the perfect world to him so he kind of goes and burns it down. It’s just one of those songs where it starts out with someone thinking they know how it’s supposed to be and at the end it’s like, “I can’t even be that way.”
Jared ‘Pyro’ is the funnest one to play live right now.

‘MARY’
Caleb ‘Mary’ is something that I was writing at the very beginning of Only By The Night. It was something I wrote in my house one night drunk. And it had such an energy to it and I loved it, but for some reason it didn’t make the cut.
Matthew It just never happened, and then somebody played an old demo and we were like, “Man, we’ve got to bring that one back around.”

Roar over to www.kingsofleon.com for more.