I can tell it’s a young man at the early stages of growing up. Sometimes I actually look at and I go, ‘Wow,’ and I’m proud of myself. Or ‘Arizona,’ ‘Knocked Up,’ ‘True Love Way,’ all those songs. “So, a song like ‘Milk’ can still give me shivers. It’s like you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, but a much younger version of yourself: someone who wasn’t necessarily as confident and was unsure of what lay ahead,” he imparts. “I feel like the longer time passes, the more they can hit me. When asked if any lyrics from the band’s earliest days resonate with him still, he’s philosophical.
Whilst his lyrics have never shied away from dark terrain - “You kick the bucket / I’ll swing my legs,” he wrote on “The Bucket,” for example - he has often tempered darkness and/or the personal with abstraction.Įven so, it is hard not to draw elements of autobiography coursing through some of his words. We were always kinda surprised that they let us keep making albums and kept paying for them.”Įvery so often, Caleb can be found contemplating the body of work they have amassed so far and is struck by what he sees. They just released the weirdness and weren’t very big, they just let us evolve naturally and grow into what we were going to be.
“They would let us be completely free artistically, and that’s why you have albums like ‘Youth and Young Manhood’ and ‘Aha Shake Heartbreak.’ Those are weird albums, and we were weird boys. “They didn’t try and make us produce radio hits,” he reflects gratefully. The ramshackle brilliance of sophomore album “Aha Shake Heartbreak” (2004) completed a two-record volley of critically acclaimed garage rock that Jared believes was only possible thanks to the patience of their longtime label, RCA Records. and Europe came flocking, turning them into cult stars. Amid Caleb’s scat-like yelps, lyrics charted brothel scrapes (“Molly’s Chambers”) and warnings of religious comeuppance (“Holy Roller Novocaine”) within their southern-fried tunes.Īudiences in the U.K. With their long hair and tight tees, the Nashville rockers looked like they’d been cryogenically frozen from the 1970s and dropped into the new century. They seemed to be something out of a bygone era themselves with a backstory almost too tantalizing to be swallowed as gospel truth.ĭrummer Nathan, Caleb and Jared Followill are the sons of a Pentecostal preacher from the American Deep South, who enlisted their cousin, Matthew Followill, to play lead guitar. It’s certainly a different world to the one Kings of Leon greeted with their boisterous debut, “Youth and Young Manhood,” in 2003. In this day and age, I wish it didn’t have to.
That isn’t something that came into our minds at all. “I don’t think any of us realized that this album didn’t have many songs that would fit the radio format. “The longer you’re doing this, the more you want to take things as far as you feel like they should go,” Caleb observes. But no such concerns influenced the music the band recorded. “When You See Yourself” has become the first release by a major rock band to be offered as an ‘NFT’ (Non-Fungible Token) - a form of non-duplicable digital token that denotes rights of ownership of the artist’s work to the purchaser.