Royal sons of a preacher man

“Hey man! Can you hear me okay? Cool! Sorry ‘bout the noise, but we’re out looking for some, like, bedding and stuff.”

Jared Followill is wandering around a Nashville shopping mall, chatting to hotpress on his mobile phone whilst he and his girlfriend browse for some new bedding for his home. A domesticated, multi-tasking bass player! Who’da thunk it?
Being many thousands of miles away, I’m afraid I can’t tell you what the youngest King Of Leon is wearing (his accent, however, is only slightly tinged with Southern drawl) but, unless it’s a mask, I’m somewhat surprised that the 21-year-old rock star can walk around an American shopping mall unhindered and unmolested by screaming fans.
After all, with sales of their third album, Because Of The Times, now well past the two million mark, the Kings are truly in the counting house these days.
While the bulk of their sales had previously been on this side of the Atlantic, their native homeland is also starting to seriously wake up to the band's eclectically electrical charms. However, they’re obviously not yet at the stage where they’re recognised everywhere they go. Which is just dandy as far as Jared is concerned.
“It’s pretty cool over here,” he tells me. “It’s one of those things where cool people know who you are, and uncool people don’t. Not necessarily uncool people, but just, like, if you get recognised it’s usually by people who look a little bit more like us rather than just random everyday kinda people. I don’t know. It seems like some American bands get big in the UK and then you come home and you get to do your own thing and nobody recognises you.”
So you’re able to do your own shopping?
“Totally!” he laughs. “Nobody recognises you in the mall.”
Having toured almost non-stop since the album’s release earlier this year, the four Followills – Jared’s older brothers Caleb and Nathan and their cousin Matthew – are currently kicking back and chilling out at their various residences in Nashville, Tennessee. The brothers have lived here since soon after their parents’ divorce. Just that these days, they’re in bigger houses.
“I love it here – couldn’t be happier really. I moved here when I was 13 so I’ve been here about seven years.”
With some well-deserved time off before they hit the road again (their first dates are in Dublin’s RDS at the end of this month), presumably the Followills are enjoying a couple of weeks of the kind of unbridled rock ‘n’ roll hedonism and hard-partying antics that they’ve become renowned for. Actually, no – the Jack Daniel’s may be always open, but the lid of the Vicodin bottle is apparently staying firmly screwed.
“We’ve all calmed down a bit,” he insists. “This is the first time in the band’s history where all four of us have a girlfriend. So it’s definitely all calmed down. We still drink before noon, but we’re off the drugs and stuff like that.”
So we’ve seen the last of the high Kings, then (at least for the moment). How about those wild groupie experiences you all used to boast about in interviews?
“Em... no. We never tried to be with groupies. It just falls into your lap – literally. Ha ha! But I’m here with my girlfriend...”

If Jared can be believed, they’re obviously a lot better behaved when they’re down-timing, but having grown up on the highways and byways of America, touring is in the KOL’s blue blood. The road is their real home, their kingdom.
How could it not be? Growing up as the sons of Leon Followill, a travelling United Pentecostal evangelist, Jared and his brothers spent much of their youth travelling around the Deep South in a purple 1988 Oldsmobile, decamping wherever and whenever their father was scheduled to preach. Except for a five-year-stretch when they settled in Jackson, Tennessee, they more or less grew up living the motel life. You might say they were born with plastic spoons in their mouths.
Given your background, constant touring can’t be a whole lot different to what you’re used to?
“Not necessarily, except for just not being at home,” Jared says. “That’s the only real thing that my past and my present really share. I mean, we were in a small Oldsmobile car back then, with five people all crammed into one car, staying in the shittiest motels in America. And now it’s a little bit different. We’re blessed, y’know. I really can’t say it’s the same, because now we’re in a nice big bus and we stay in nicer hotels and stuff like that. So it’s basically the same concept, but also a whole lot different.”
How did your education work when you were on the move so much?
“My mom would do it primarily, but if we knew that we were gonna be somewhere for more than six months, we’d enrol in one of the schools there. But for the most part it was my mom.”
Jared has no regrets about his unconventional nomadic upbringing: “It definitely made us closer than most families that I know. More than anything, it made me really close to my mom because she was always there. It made it more difficult for me to go to school because I felt kind of uncomfortable because it wasn’t what I was used to. You know, going to school with a bunch of other kids, rather than just waking up at 11 and doing my own work with my mom right there. It just seemed a little more difficult.”
As the sons of a travelling preacher man, the three brothers attended countless religious services and were often enlisted to sing gospel songs or play backing drums. When their parents divorced in 1997 – a fairly serious no-no within the Pentecostal community – Leon left his ministry. Although it has recently been reported that he was actually defrocked, the boys claim he resigned of his own volition because, “he knew it was time.”
After an upbringing like that, are you still religious?
“Well, I’m definitely not too into organised religion, but I still pray,” he admits. “I dunno, it would just seem weird not to. I don’t really understand how some people cannot believe at all because... I mean, if you’ve reached a point where you don’t believe in anything, it’s almost like then why wouldn’t you just kill yourself? Because if nothing’s gonna happen, with all these bad things that happen in the world, wars and diseases and stuff like that, it seems like if there’s no afterlife then you might as well just kill yourself. So I kind of have to believe in something. It’s what keeps us going.”
After their parents’ divorce, the boys and their mother, Betty Ann, moved to her native Oklahoma for a brief time, before eventually settling in Nashville. Because of their father’s strict religious beliefs, previously they hadn’t been allowed to listen to anything other than gospel music, but suddenly they were free to explore other musical and cultural avenues. This sudden exposure to contemporary American pop culture was a total revelation – initially, at least.
“I loved it!” Jared enthuses. “I kinda jumped in with both feet. I dunno. I went to a school with tons of kids who were really cool and pretty girls and... I dunno, I don’t wanna sound ridiculous but it was really easy for me. I kinda got in there and was popular almost immediately and I had tons of friends so it was almost a life-changing great experience. And then I kinda realised that a lot of it was bullshit, really. I kinda did what other kids did – started smoking weed and listening to the bands that everybody else liked.”
While all the Followill brothers loved the novelties of television, videogames and the music of the likes of the Pixies, Led Zepellin and the Velvet Underground, Jared himself didn’t begin to explore other areas of popular culture until later.
“Was I reading books? Not as much. I realise now that books are good but, when I was in high school, reading was the last thing that I wanted to do. But definitely there are quite a few that I really kinda latched onto – like Catcher In The Rye and stuff like that. I know that’s everybody’s favourite book, but I must’ve read it five or six times.”
Although they’d always messed around with music, settling fulltime in Nashville allowed them to properly develop their skills and hone their hugely distinctive sound. KOL officially formed in 2000, when they enlisted their cousin Matthew into their rehearsal sessions. Things happened relatively quickly for the burgeoning band when a chance meeting between eldest brother Caleb and the singer Trey Boyer led to a management deal that same year.
By 2002, the Kings Of Leon (obviously the moniker was chosen in honour of their father) had signed to RCA and already banged out a gutsy, critically acclaimed five-track EP (Holy Roller Novocaine). Even before their first album, Youth And Young Manhood was released in 2003, the UK music press was going crazy for the hellraising young Southerners.
Their gritty, garagey, rock & roll debut sold around 750,000 copies in Ireland and the UK, and shifted a respectable 100,000 at home. Second album Aha Shake Heartbreak – which featured tongue-in-cheek songs about worrying about male baldness and impotence – performed even better, debuting at Number Three in the UK charts and confirming their status as bona-fide rock stars in Europe.
Having toured successfully with U2 (see panel below) KOL also wound up supporting the likes of Bob Dylan and Pearl Jam.
What was the Big Zim like?
“He was great, too, really cool, but a little less personable than U2 were. I’m sure he has the right to be like that. I mean, Bob Dylan’s the kinda guy who influences everybody’s favourite band. Whether he’s your own personal favourite or not, he’s definitely a major cause of why you love the bands you love. He’s influenced everybody. We didn’t talk to him very much, but when we did everything he said was classic. He was a really cool guy.”
Their relationship with Eddie Vedder and co is obviously a lot more convivial.
“Pearl Jam? They’re just really super nice guys. We toured with them a few times. We played with them in Australia, and Eddie got up on stage with us. Eddie Vedder’s possibly the sweetest man in the world. He’s got the biggest heart. He’s just the nicest guy I’ve ever met. He’s got a lovely wife and lovely daughter. I think we all aspire to have his kind of life.”
Another band they’re pretty close to are Black Rebel Motorcycle Club with whom they’ve just released the Split EP on iTunes.
“We did a tour together and they opened up for us all over America. We played Radio City Music Hall and a bunch of big places. But it was great. They’ve always been one of our favourite bands and they were a big influence on us when we were starting our own band. We couldn’t really believe they said yes. We usually submit 20 bands that we really wanna tour with, and five or six will say yes and then we go from there. And they were one of the bands who said yes. So we were pretty much sold immediately.”
Far more polished and produced than their previous efforts, the band’s platinum-selling third album Because Of The Times (the title comes from an annual Pentecostal gathering they used to have to attend, and is so named because “it’s the answer to every question in the world”) solidified their position as one of the most exciting new American acts to emerge this century.
“We’ve just sold tons of albums,” he says, delightedly. “I think it’s over two million now.” Hilariously, his voice gets a little high-pitched as he says the word ‘two’, as though he still can’t quite believe their massive success.
Actually, far more people have heard KOL’s distinctively hewn sound than probably realise. The band’s music has featured in numerous videogames, movies and TV shows – and their song ‘Molly Chambers’ even featured in a V.W. Jetta commercial.
While artists like Tom Waits and Nick Cave refuse to allow their music to be used in advertising because to do so would be disrespectful to their muse, Jared maintains that KOL have no such compunctions.
“We work so hard to make a little money most of the time. That’s one way you can make a lot of money doing no work. You know, we didn’t start our band and write songs so we could be underground. We want people to hear our music and we want people to be fans of ours. And that’s a good way to get it out there.
“Sometimes our music is on really cheesy stuff that you don’t expect it to be. You don’t know how things are going to turn out. The directors don’t show you the movies beforehand. Sometimes you say, well, someone’s past work was really good so let’s do it, and then the movie comes out and it’s kind of embarrassing. But it doesn’t bother us none. I think nowadays it’s absolutely impossible to sell-out. I mean, everything is selling-out.”
Although much of this year has been spent touring and promoting Because Of The Times, it’s been reported that the Kings are already hard at work on their fourth album. However, Jared insists that these reports are somewhat premature.
“Em... we’re kind of working on it, but not necessarily,” he avers. “We’re really just kind of getting the ideas together. Caleb and I wrote a little bit yesterday over at his house. We’re in the very, very beginning stages, like the infancy stages, of this album. So we don’t know exactly what it’s gonna sound like or where it’s gonna go. Right now we have more slow, pretty-sounding songs than anything, but we’re trying to make it a little bit more upbeat right now. It’s kind of a hard thing being productive.
“A lot of bands can write a million singles, but can never write a great slow song, but for us it’s like so much easier to write a slow song than it is to write a fast song. But we’re figuring it out.”
Although Caleb initially wrote all of the band’s songs, Jared explains that KOL have gradually become a more collaborative unit: “I’ve always contributed to the music, you know. I’ve written every one of my bass lines and stuff like that. I never really had any help with that. But now it’s getting more in-depth. We’re kind of going beyond our own instruments and getting into percussion, some backing vocals and production and lyrics and everything. We’re all collaborating and trying to make it sound the best we can.”
Will they work with producers Ethan Johns and Angelo Petraglia on this next one?
“We’re not positive. We’re weighing our options up. It all really depends. I don’t know if I can even say it, but I think we’re gonna work with Angelo again. We might just stay at home and do it ourselves with Angelo. We say this every record. We say we’re gonna use different producers and we always end up with the same one. But it’s still in the air.”
Does being a close-knit band of brothers – and cousins – make it easier to work together?
“It’s probably different from other bands in that there’s a lot more tension,” he laughs. “There’s always a lot more tension with us because with brothers there is absolutely zero common courtesy and zero understanding of the kind that would come with someone that you weren’t related to. If we were in the band with other people, I feel that you would be almost forced and obligated to be nice to the other people. But because we’re family that all goes out the window.”
Does it ever get physical?
“Oh yeah – plenty of times. But that’s only when it gets too fun. Ha ha”
What’s been the longest period of band members not speaking to each other?
“It’s kind of fucking hard because we work like dogs! We’re on the road every single day so we kind of have to talk to each other at soundchecks. But there’s definitely been weeks of... very minimal talking.”
Is it tougher for you being the youngest?
“Not necessarily. I mean, it’s maybe easiest for me because a lot of the stuff that made us all crazy was when we were really young and I was maybe a little bit... em, maybe it didn’t affect me so much when we were out touring and partying because I was so young.”
There are certain similarities between a presidential election campaign and an album tour for a rock band. The copious sex, booze and drugs aside, both also involve lots of whistlestop travelling, meeting strangers and convincing them that you’re worth it.
Last year, Caleb told Australian GQ that the Followills are directly descended from President George Washington. Was that just something he made up for the press?
“No man!” he insists. “We definitely are – 100%. Our grandfather’s name is George Washington, and his dad was, and his dad was, and it goes back, like, forever. That line goes all the way back from my grandpa – his father’s father’s father – and they’re all named George Washington. And it goes back to George Washington’s brother, who named his son after George. And then it went from him all the way down the line to my grandfather. So George Washington was one of our greatest uncles.”
What’s Jared’s considered opinion of the latest George currently occupying the White House?
“I don’t know,” he says, cautiously. “I’ll be happy to see somebody new. I’d be happy to see a fresh face. It’s hard to say right now. I mean, I think everybody kind of thinks he’s a fuck-up, but it’ll be good in 10 or 15 years or something like that, when hopefully more and more stuff will come out, and we’ll all get to see the truth a little bit more. We may never know but, right now, nobody knows for sure exactly what’s going on.
“I can’t imagine George Bush really thinking up all these war plans and stuff like that. He has trouble putting together sentences. I would think the people behind him are maybe a little more corrupt than him. But it’ll be better in 10 years.”
Do you have any friends serving in Iraq?
“No, none. I don’t really have any friends – truthfully! There’s probably people that I went to school with and stuff like that that are over there, but you just kinda lose touch with them. So I don’t know anybody for sure that’s over there.”

“Baby!”
Jared’s girlfriend suddenly interrupts in the background, announcing that she’s found the bedsheets she wanted (presumably they’re King-sized). He almost has to go, sheets to the wind.
Before he does, though, we’ve time for a few quick words about KOL’s forthcoming Dublin gigs.
“We love it over there in Ireland. It’s one of our best – actually, I hate using this word, but our record label tell us that it’s one of our best markets. The fans are great. There’s always a lot of energy at those shows. We always have fun. It’s great!”
What kind of show can fans expect at the RDS?
“We feed off the crowd more than anything,” he explains. “So if the crowd is rowdy then we’ll have the best show we’ve ever had. It completely depends on the crowd. If the crowd sits still, I think it pisses us all off and we’ll just kinda stand there and play the songs, and make it as boring as possible for the boring fans. So as long as they’re rowdy in Dublin, and don’t throw too much beer on our pedal-boards, then we’ll be fine.”
Following the second Dublin show, Jared will be donning headphones and spinning discs at the official KOL aftershow party in the Tivoli. Does he DJ often?
“Not necessarily. I mean, I usually just do it for after-parties and stuff like that, but I’ve only done a few ones where people actually knew that I was doing it beforehand, y’know. I usually just get up there and do it off the cuff.”
Well, if KOL ever implode in a drink and drug-fuelled mewl of bitter sibling rivalries, he’ll always have another career to fall back on. With things going so well for them at the moment, could he see the band still together in 25 years time like their U2 heroes?
“I don’t see why not,” he muses. “We’re in nice buses and we’re in nice venues and we’re in really nice hotels. It’s our job, it’s how we make money, and it’s not that hard. It wouldn’t be so bad, getting more and more fans and getting more and more popular, and being able to keep on doing it for another 25 years. That’d be pretty damn cool with us.”
And probably with everyone else, too.

Jared (and the Kings of Leon) will be DJ-ing at the band's Corona Presents... Official Aftershow Party at the Tivoli Theatre on November 28. Tickets are available from the Tivoli Box Office at www.tivoli.ie