Music: Kings of Leon at Cruzan
Kings Of Leon return to the states this month to begin its second straight summer playing amphitheaters across the country. It’s actually a step down from where the group just was — in the United Kingdom and Europe, playing shows in front of 60,000 to 70,000 fans in outdoor stadiums.
Knowing this is about as big as a band can get in any country, it’s fun to hear drummer Nathan Followill still able to fondly recall the early days and how he and his bandmates — brothers Caleb Followill (singer/guitar) and Jared Followill (bass) and cousin Matthew Followill (guitar) – felt when they first got the chance to tour worldwide behind the Kings Of Leon’s 2003 debut CD, “Youth and Young Manhood.”
“You know, I think luckily for us we didn’t know you weren’t supposed to play 250 shows a year,” the drummer said. “We didn’t think like we’re being overworked here. But we had never traveled the world…So early on we were just fascinated with being able to travel the world and see places we never thought we would see. To be honest with you, we thought we wouldn’t get to make a second record, so we tried to tour as much as we could and go to as many places as we could so we would have stories and pictures to show and tell our kids.”
That first CD was more than good enough to show that this band of Tennesseans (who grew up traveling Southern United States with their preacher father and had to break family rules to listen to rock and roll) deserved to make more records. It was also popular enough to put the band on a fast track to becoming major stars in the UK and Europe.
And finally, the success spread to these shores with the band’s fourth CD, 2008’s “Only By The Night.” The CD spawned chart-topping hits with “Sex On Fire,” “Use Somebody” and won the band four Grammy awards, making the Kings Of Leon arguably the biggest rock band on the planet at least in terms of CD sales at that point in time.
“I think we’ve all taken it in stride,” Nathan said. “Once we first started (to break out), after the Grammys and all of that stuff, we kind of all had a little band meeting and kind of put our heads together and were like ‘We’re still the same band. We’re still all family. We’ll still tell each other they’re ugly and all of that stuff.’ So we tried really hard not to let that affect us as people and us as a band, and I think we’ve kept it in check pretty well up to this point.”
What’s more, that hard-touring ethic that originally stemmed from wanting to get as much life out of releasing and touring behind the first album has paid off in other ways.
“Luckily for us, we toured so much early on and built such a fan base that we can now go to play to 10,000 or 12,000 kids in any city in the world,” he said. “So we don’t really have that pressure of ‘Oh s—, we finally had a big hit in America. Now we’ve got to keep this thing going while it lasts.’
“From day one, we said we want to have a box set career,” Nathan said. “We had friends that were in bands that came out and right out of the gate had a huge success and sold millions of records and were on the cover of every magazine and life was great – until they came out with their second record. Once you start out on the mountaintop, unless you’ve got a helicopter there ain’t nowhere else to go but down. So we decided we would start on the base of the mountain and be able to afford a helicopter by the time we’d get to the top.”
That philosophy is serving Kings Of Leon well now. The group’s latest CD, “Come Around Sundown,” has not been the blockbuster hit – at least yet — that “Only By The Night Was.” It isn’t a flop. It’s produced a number one alternative rock single (“Radioactive”) and has topped 500,000 copies sold in the states. Still, that’s a far cry from the multiple millions of units the previous CD moved.
But to hear Nathan, this downturn was something he and his bandmates knew was a distinct possibility – and something the group willingly risked.
Instead of doing the easy thing and following the stylistic blueprint of “Only By The Night” and its hit singles, the band took a risk and made a CD in “Come Around Sundown” that is a bit different from any of the four previous albums and continues to show the band’s musical growth.
The band signals its intentions with the opening track, “Back Down South,” an unhurried tune with a decidedly country accent that builds to luminous finish. There’s a bit of sunny, soulful personality to “Beach Side,” another song that’s a bit different for Kings Of Leon. A third song that is a bit of a departure – “Mary” – is arguably the CD’s high point. It’s a shimmering rocker with a touch of gospel in vocals and a killer guitar solo. And while several other songs (like the easy-going rocker “Mi Amigo” and the propulsive “No Money”) will strike familiar chords, overall “Come Around Sundown” is a more relaxed and varied work that rewards repeated listenings.
“It was kind of like we could go in there and try to write a record full of ‘Sex On Fires’ and ‘Use Somebodys,’ and probably reach the same audience,” Nathan said. “Of course, you have managers and label people like ‘Oh yeah, strike while the iron’s hot’ and ‘Keep the train rolling down the tracks.’ We kind of looked at it in the opposite way of OK, we’re lucky that we made a record that was now commercially successful (in the states), but we don’t want to do a disservice to ourselves and go in there and make a record that we didn’t really want to make, to make a record that we weren’t inspired to make at that time.”
It’s not as if the band has given up on “Come Around Sundown” yet either, as Nathan noted that the cycle behind “Only Because The Night” lasted 18 months.
“It’s only been out for seven months,” he said. “We haven’t even toured on America on this album yet. So you never can tell. All it takes is that one radio station to pick it up, and then others pick it up and it blows up.”
But the band isn’t pushing its newest CD overly hard on the American tour this summer. That’s an ironic turn of events, Nathan said, considering the band members had to fight the urge last summer on the U.S. tour to load their set with “Come Around Sundown” songs, They resisted, knowing CD wasn’t yet out and crowds weren’t familiar with the songs.
“We found a pretty good balance between the new and the old and tried not to give too much away,” Nathan said of last summer’s shows.” “This last tour (of Europe and the UK), where we could have played every song from the new record, we found ourselves picking out the (new) songs that we thought went over the best with the crowd…We found ourselves playing songs from our first record that we hadn’t played in quite a while. I think we just like to confuse ourselves.”
If that’s the case, more bands will want to be confused.
TO GO: Kings of Leon will play the Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach on Wednesday, August 3, 2011. Doors open at 6pm. Show is at 7pm. Tickets are $25 – $75.
