Kings of Leon: From Underground to Superstardom
By Andy Argyrakis, senior editor, gmclife.com
Even though Kings of Leon’s been in business since 1999, it wasn’t until the last few years that the rock n’ roll act became a household name. The trio of home-schooled brothers (whose dad was a pastor) and a cousin from Nashville started off locally, soon after graduating to major festivals (like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza) and eventually catching the ear of U2, who the guys opened for on a 2005 arena outing. From then until now, the group’s steadily ascended the mainstream pop and rock charts thanks to singles like “Use Somebody” and “Notion,” all of which helped the band’s breakthrough CD Only By the Night (RCA) sell over a million copies in America alone. This summer finds the 2010 double GRAMMY Award-winning group hitting major amphitheatres all across the globe, which as Caleb Followill (vocals) and Jared Followill (bass) told gmclife.com during a pre-tour teleconference, will find the group growing on all levels and using the newfound platform to give back to their flood-recovering community.
Now that you have had a chance to expand your audience to a wider level than just the indie scene, how do you feel like your music is connecting with the mainstream masses?
Caleb: That's a good question. I think it's definitely connecting with the mainstream audience more so than we ever thought that our music would, and some bands might look at that as a negative thing, but we see it as a very positive thing, and the fact that now we have a wider audience and a lot more people's attention, I think now the real test is to see if they want to continue on the journey with us and go where we want to go musically.
What scared you about achieving that level of popularity and did it turn out that any of the things you were scared about came to be?
Caleb: The thing that kind of scared us a little is what people's expectations would be, and we did get that. When we went on stage, at times, we're not having the best show, well, you can see it. We wear our hearts on our sleeves and our attitudes and everything, and it got to a point where people are saying "well, I paid money to come see a good show and you come out here and you act a certain way." And that's how we've always been and you know, we are very passionate and we are trying to scale it back a little bit and not offend the people in the crowd. But for us, we're still a guitar band and we're still trying to play songs that we enjoy and hopefully the rest of the world will enjoy. But for the most part, I was scared to death when we got off the road, I thought we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without people recognizing us and stuff but somehow, some way, we've seemed to manage to get under the radar just enough to where we just made another album and people don’t really even realize it. So I don’t think that the things that we were scared about have necessarily come to pass just yet, but we'll see when we start the tour, how young the people are.
