Nylon - October 2008 - (Page 106) take me higher It’s got to be intense to be in a band with blood relatives. “At this point,” Kings of Leon singer Caleb Followill says, “we’ve gotten over some pretty big hurdles.” He’s referring to an incident last year when he and his brother Nathan, the band’s hirsute drummer, got into a fistfight, and Caleb badly injured his shoulder. Neither party remembers the exact reason behind the scuffle—they were too hammered—but Caleb blames the ruckus on overblown egos. “When you have screaming fans in your face every night,” he says, “you start to buck up and think you’re something special.” In a roundabout way, the Kings’ new album, Only by the Night, directly benefited from this brotherly squabble. Though Caleb spent the year after the fight popping his wayward arm back into its socket several times a week, when he finally finished touring and had surgery, he was introduced to what would become his most recent inspiration: painkillers. The result of his blissed-out recovery is a superb set of songs that fuse giant pop hooks with eerie, otherworldly effects. “I wrote a good portion of these songs with certain substances in my system,” Caleb says. “I have this evil alter-ego that pops up when I’ve had too much to drink.” Specifically, he cites his tendency to mouth off while drunk, a characteristic he chronicles on the album in the song “Notion.” His pharmaceutical experiments are also evident on the sweeping choruses and aural explosions on songs such as the new single “Sex on Fire,” and the pretty countermelodies on the yearning, humble “Use Somebody.” The Kings have come a long way since the Tennessean band of three brothers—the sons of a traveling Pentecostal preacher—and one cousin started their career with Youth and Young Manhood in 2003. They toured with SOUND TO A LITTLE BIT THE KINGS OF LEON’S NEW ALBUM OWES ITS SOARING, SPOOKY BY JO MCCAUGHEY PHOTOGRAPHED OF PHARMACEUTICAL FUN. BY CRISTINA BLACK. the Strokes, became a fixture on the U.K. charts, and—with slim physiques clad in skinny jeans and tiny vests—dated a bevy of well-known models, among other rock ’n’ roll perks. Once a testosteronedriven kid who publicly denounced monogamy and boasted about indulging groupies’ advances, Caleb has now grown into a twentysomething with a stable girlfriend, model Lily Aldridge, and has also cut his hair and developed a preference for loose—well, looser—pants. And though he hopes the new album will finally propel his family band to the level of fame enjoyed by U2, who the Kings opened for in 2005, he’s nervous about the intensifying pressures of his own snowballing success. “We put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” he says. “We just refuse to put out a record that isn’t an improvement over what we’ve done before.” Caleb still considers Kings of Leon underdogs, and he’s hoping the new album of writ-large rock will rectify that. “We’ve had some of the biggest and best bands around take us on tour because they think we’re an important band and don’t want us to give up,” he says. Asked if quitting is an option, he answers “No,” and then back peddles a little. “Well, you never know.”
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