Kings of Leon return this fall with a new album that’s a bit of a left turn, sonic-wise. And for that, you can thank a game of tag that went, well, sideways.
Frontman Caleb Followill was working on new music last spring and about to join his bandmates on a European tour when he broke his foot playing with his kids one night before bed.
“I thought I was in better shape than I was and so I was going to hurdle the couch to make the epic tag,” he says, laughing. Instead, he got a foot caught in the couch, stumbled and went down. “It was a gnarly, gnarly break.”
Followill was upset, feeling he was letting everyone down. After a few days of wallowing in self-pity, he picked up a guitar. What came out surprised him: It was stripped bare, like the music that he and his drummer brother Nathan had written before there was a four-time Grammy Award-winning Kings of Leon.
So out went the four or five electric-leaning songs that he and the band had been exploring. In quickly came a clutch of new stripped-down tunes, more melancholic than bombastic, about gratitude and family. The 13-track album is called “O My Beloved” and it’s out Nov. 6.
“The songs just took on a different meaning, and so all the songs that we had been working on, they no longer were as attractive to me,” says Caleb Followill. “I feel like just the whole temperature changed around us. And we realized that we’re going to make something a little more significant.”
What did the rest of the band think? They had to change course, too, after all. “I’m happy with the direction,” says Nathan Followill. “I think it might be my kids’ favorite record.”
The first single is a scene of domestic bliss
The first single, “My Whole World,” out Thursday, is a perfect taste of the way the band was now leaning. It poured out of Caleb Followill after the whole tag accident.
While he and bandmates — brothers Nathan and Jared and cousin Matthew Followill — called off their European tour, and Caleb’s family was preparing for a cruise, he was glancing at their countdown on the wall when these words came out: “29 days ’till our ship comes in/We’ll be together again.”
“My Whole World” is a scene of domestic bliss — with references to “peanut butter pie” and a “pin oak tree” and tossing a football around while babies coo. “I’m grateful / Each day for / My whole world,” he sings. A video for the single features old home footage of the boys growing up — Christmas mornings, goofing around and swimming holes.
Caleb Followill says he was nervous to debut the acoustic-led song to the other guys, in part because he didn’t normally play his guitar that way and because the lyrics made him emotional.
“I wasn’t in control of it. The words were just coming out,” he says. He thought of his mom dying and all the feelings he had put aside as a busy dad and rock and roller for the past quarter century.
“We have already surpassed anything we ever imagined we could do and we’ve built something that’s so beautiful,” he says. “So, as opposed to having a 25-year anniversary where we kind of put out the greatest hits or something, I thought, wouldn’t it be beautiful to make an album that is looking back on all of the things that we’ve done and appreciating how we got here?”
Bassist Jared Followill says the band was free to explore this new direction since the new album would be the first time they would be producing themselves.
“The songs just really started to pile up one after another and it became apparent that there could be something there and let’s just dive in,” he says. “No hesitation from us.”
‘O My Beloved’ includes song inspired by childhood
One album highlight is the joyful, laid-back “KOYSAR” for “Kick Off Your Shoes and Run,” in which Caleb Followill uses his childhood memories of romping around with his siblings to inspire his own kids.
“Kick off your shoes and run/Don’t let them turn you away/Your life is better when/You have something to say,” he sings.
“All I could picture was our childhood, running through sprinklers and my kids and those little simple moments,” he says. “You’re always trying to teach your kids something, and I feel the best way to do that is through your experience and through the mistakes that you’ve made and how you’ve gotten to where you are.”
On “Such a Pretty Thing,” he writes tenderly about a high school sweetheart, singing, “I like to lay in the light of the moon/And think about the summer that I had with you.”
“That was the kind of songs that we wanted to write, and then we started the band and kind of went a different direction. But on this album, I feel like we kind of got back to that,” says Caleb Followill. “We finally got to do it on album 10.”
The title track is unconventional, too. It’s a musical interlude that has the title on it, a tiny, lo-fi slice of Caleb Followill singing and playing captured on a smartphone in the wet and cold outside the band’s Nashville studio with the sound of a train rumbling by.
“It turned out really, really cool and so we kept it,” says Jared Followill.
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