Caleb interview i found

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JB HI-FI website Caleb interview for those interested... ;D

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Caleb intervieww... enjoy!

Interview With Caleb
Kings of Leon open their debut album with a song called “Knocked Up”. Caleb Followill, one of three sons of a disgraced Pentecostal minister, Leon, who plies his trade with their cousin, croons: “I don’t care what nobody says/We’re gonna have a baby.” It’s not autobiographical – it’s a story, a tale, a possibility of a chance of an occurrence, as Caleb drawls the lyrics out in his thick Southern brogue.

It’s something that’s repeated throughout the band’s third album, the incredible Because of the Times. It’s the sound of a band expanding their vision in the wake of debut Youth & Young Manhood and follow-up Aha Shake Heartbreak, as Kings of Leon stake their claim as one of the best bands of the 2000s, each album finding them improving.

It’s taken three years for the group to follow up Aha Shake Heartbreak, which itself appeared only a year or so after their successful debut. “I didn’t want it to be so evident exactly when I’m talking about myself,” Caleb says of the band’s third album. “I’m a little more private now, and I don’t want people to know everything personally about me. There’s still a lot of me in this record, and a lot of these stories I’m tellin’ them with myself in mind, trying to think of if I could be that person.”

Maintaining privacy in a rock ‘n roll band is fraught with danger – especially when you’re in Kings of Leon, a band feted by the notorious British press, who like to prick and probe into every grimy detail of your very existence. “In order to do this I don’t think everybody should know everything about me,” he bristles. “I’m singing a lot clearer and I’m not ashamed of what I’m saying – the songs aren’t so blatantly personal that I have to hide what I’m saying.”

It’s something that’s immediately noticeable when first hearing Because of the Times – this album finds Kings of Leon cleaning up their sound, adding space within the mix where previously there was clutter, giving room for the guitars of Caleb and cousin Nathan to shine, amping up Caleb’s vocals to listenable level. It was a deliberate decision that the band took, with greater confidence in their own ability and confidence that they can deliver it how they want it to be.

“For a long time I did things with other people in mind, thinking that I don’t know what they’re going to think,” he avers. “But now I don’t really give a damn what people think – I want to make music for me, and we want to make music that makes Kings of Leon proud, and Kings of Leon experience things that we haven’t done yet.

“Singing is one of them,” he sniffs. “I was always scared that people wouldn’t like the way I sung so I sang a different way, and it ended up gettin’ too much attention.”

An evolutionary process from the debut EP Holy Roller Novocaine onward, Caleb says that from the very beginning the band has always talked about their third record. “Before we made our first record there were things that we always wanted to do and ‘they’ [‘the man’, perhaps?] always said ‘that sounds like album three’. Even though once we got to album three we didn’t still want to do the things that we wanted to do back then, we knew that with this album we could do whatever we wanted, and we weren’t worried about what people were going to think. Luckily we haven’t sold millions and millions of records so we don’t really have to repeat ourselves.”

Given that the band are, and have been since their very beginning, part of the major label system, you might expect that there would be certain pressures on Because of the Times to beat the petite sales of the band’s first two albums. “I’m sure they do, but they can all kiss my ass,” he shrugs. “For every record that we do sell they’re spending that money…the record label doesn’t do shit for you; all they do is give you a loan. Luckily for us we picked the right label that not only gave us a loan but left us alone – they let us do what we wanted to do, and honestly I don’t know how in hell we’ve made three records, how they’ve stuck by us because we’ve always had the same attitude and that’s we want to do what we want to do, and if you get in the way…”

He lets the threat linger, before continuing to say that perhaps Kings of Leon have made adverse choices that have frustrated their minders but they’ve helped maintain the integrity of the band – they haven’t done iPod commercials, they haven’t followed the crowd – and yet people are still talking about the band because of the MUSIC that they create, not for any extraneous activities that they might otherwise have been involved in. As a result of the greater focus on production, performance, and lyrical content, Because of the Times is the sound of a band coming into their own.

“We weren’t going to let anyone fuck this up,” he claims. “We know exactly what we wanted to do here. After it was written, before we even recorded it, there was this feeling of ease, like this calm before the storm that came over us, and this is the first record that before we’d got to the studio we’d all hang out and have a couple of drinks because we knew, in our minds, that the songs were good enough and all we had to do was get our attitude right and get our heads in the right place to where we could go and be confident enough to really go for it, and lay it all out there.”

Kings of Leon’s Because of the Times is out now.

[skatf]

"Cousin" Nathan?!?

[Lihllvmch]

Haha the rebel Caleb