Kings of Leon: ‘Our mother dying was like a sacrifice to the band’

Kings of Leon are sitting looking happy and healthy this crisp spring morning. They’re in high spirits – in London ahead of the release of their stirring new album Ca We Have Fun Now – having emerged from the aftermath of tragedy. In September 2021, brothers Caleb, Jared, and Nathan Followill – three-quarters of the Grammy-winning guitar band – were rocked by the untimely death of their mother, Betty Ann Murphy.

The group, which also includes their cousin Matthew on guitar, were already at a creative crossroads. Following the release of their raw and rootsy 2003 debut, Youth and Young Manhood, and later, 2008’s Only by the Night, which contained their chart-topping anthem Sex on Fire, they had experienced a decade of turbulent fame, exacerbated by in-fighting and drinking.

They’d set about repairing the cracks, but as guitar rock was eclipsed in popularity by chart-friendly pop and innovative hip-hop, the Kings’ arena-filling soundscapes could sound less stimulating in comparison. When they released their 2021 album, When You See Yourself, The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick pined for their “old upstart energy”. It seemed as if, by approaching middle age, the band – all married with children, living in and around Nashville – were losing their edge.

It was around this time that the suggestion arose for the Kings to mark their 20 years in the business with a Greatest Hits album. But Betty Ann’s death, which the band have never spoken about beyond tributes on social media, changed everything.

In the lounge of a luxury hotel suite in London, a meaningful look darts between the two brothers when I raise the subject of her passing. “I think about it a lot, how it was like a sacrifice,” says bassist Jared. “It’s made us all come closer together, and all become better people.”

“I felt like that was when the next chapter really began, and that’s when I really went soul searching,” continues lead singer Caleb. “I went and buried myself away, looking for answers. But I [realised], maybe she didn’t know it, but she did that so that we could have a future. Because when she died, that’s when inspiration went boom, and the lights came on.”

Ignoring management advice, the Kings instead set about writing a brand new record, Can We Please Have Fun. The title, as much a mantra as a lifeline, suggests the band want to break with the rather serious and insular image they have unintentionally cultivated since their rise, partly down to their strict religious upbringing. The brothers’ father, Ivan Leon Followill, was a Pentecostal preacher who’d drive around the country sermonising, raising his sons in a strict doctrine that prohibited movies, music, and sports. In 1997, Ivan’s alcoholism led to his resigning the church, and divorcing Betty Ann.

But, insists Caleb, “we’re quick-witted and charming! Not to toot our own horn, but you can see the people around us going, ‘Man, if people knew this about you, they would love you.’”

When the band were in a bad way – such as when a visibly drunk Caleb walked off stage early at a gig in Dallas in 2011, resulting in the remainder of the tour being cancelled – it was Betty Ann who reportedly eased the tensions and guided the brothers back on track. “At my lowest points in our career when I was just down and in the muck,” says Caleb, “she would always say, ‘Babe, you’re gonna lose their respect. You can’t get that back.’ And so, when it did happen, that was like a mission for me. It was like, ‘I’m gonna get their respect back.”

Following the cancelled tour in 2011, Caleb realised his drinking was causing problems. “There are internal sicknesses & problems that have needed to be addressed,” Jared tweeted after the  show. “I can’t lie,” he wrote in his next post, “There are problems in our band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade”.

Caleb set about curbing his lifestyle. “There was a healing period,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I had to forgive them for what felt like them turning their back on me. And they had to heal too, from years and years of all of us going too hard and egos getting big.”

Can We Please Have Fun, then, is the sound of a more purposeful Kings of Leon, also partly inspired by a book, The Artist’s Way, which Caleb had bought for his bandmates in the hope it would light a spark in them the same way it had for him. Since its publication in 1992, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way has been credited as the key that unlocked the imaginations of countless celebrities who claimed to have reached a creative impasse, including Reese Witherspoon, Pete Townshend, Alicia Keys, and Martin Scorsese. The self-help manual advises on steps to regain one’s productivity, which for Caleb meant remembering that writing should be pleasurable.

Though produced by Kid Harpoon (who in between sessions picked up two Grammys for his work on Harry Styles’ Harry’s House), Can We Please Have Fun is not brimming with the kind of joyful pop you might expect from the title. Instead, there is a boldness most evident in lead single, Mustang. A sonic cousin of Sex On Fire, it solicits the listener to go hard or go home. “Are you a mustang or a kitty?,” Caleb demands as the choruses build into a mighty rallying call.

And it begins with Ballerina Radio, “a very dark song,” says Jared, whose bassline pulses under typically cryptic lyrics from Caleb, about a man “surviving on supper from a can”. “That is a guy that is living a lonely life somewhere in the future because everything else has been destroyed,” Caleb explains. Punky head rush Nothing To Do can be interpreted as a swipe at today’s complicated socio-politics: “There is panic in the streets / Man is obsolete / The wires got crossed and now we don’t speak.” But the band reveals it has more to do with AI. “I feel like everything I write is future,” Caleb shrugs. “Anytime I do try to have a political message in anything, it’s usually not the songs that you think.” Which brings us on to Hesitation Generation – “That one is political,” laughs Caleb.

“It’s about this generation,” says Jared of the spiky rocker’s lyrics, which include, “They wrote me off the page / And put me where the streets are empty / Where no one would ever find me out,” and pleads that “Conversation only got in the way.”

“And about fear,” continues Caleb, clearly referencing cancel culture. “You don’t want to say anything because of what might happen, so instead we’re all just going to be quiet. We’re all going to sit back and wait for someone else to make a mistake. I don’t like that.”

With enough traces of their rowdy sound of yore, the album is still identifiably Kings of Leon, but, understandably with eight children between them (a ninth, Jared’s second, is due imminently), priorities and perspectives have shifted. “You have this reckless, fearless nonchalance when you’re starting that people love and they attach themselves to, and they like that, and that makes it their favourite,” Jared reasons. “We are making better music. People hear that and they’re like, ‘They’re wrong. It’s definitely better in the early stuff.’ Which I totally get, but you’re kinda mixing ‘favourite’ and ‘best’. I’ve got a favourite movie, and what I think is the best movie, and they’re completely different.”

“I feel,” adds Caleb, “like this is the most fearless we’ve been creatively since the beginning.” Jared agrees. “But,” the bassist interjects, “our fearlessness now comes from courage. Your fearlessness when you’re young comes from stupidity.”

Can We Please Have Fun is the manifestation of Kings of Leon’s renewed confidence. With no immediately discernible chart-topping smashes, it’s an album that harkens back to vinyl’s glory days, when LPs were made to savour. “I feel like we accomplished something great that we wanted to,” says Caleb.

It’s an older and wiser Kings pf Leon that will be headlining the BST Hyde Park stage this June when they return for their first British gig in two years. It was in Britain that the Kings of Leon first found fame, before America caught on. “This is where all of our ancestors come from,” says Jared, “so it feels like we’re coming home.”

Can We Please Have Fun is released on May 10