Kings of Leon Brothers ‘BARELY SPOKE’ Following Rise To Fame

Published on September 09, 2016

The KINGS OF LEON rockers lost their friendship and “brotherhood” due to the pressures of fame.

The group, brothers Caleb Followill, Nathan Followill and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, has won critical acclaim thanks to tracks like The Bucket and Sex on Fire.

While their success was on the rise in the early ’00s, the same couldn’t be said for the musicians’ relationships with each other, as frontman Caleb admits the bigger they got, the more they steadily grew apart.

“After a while, it’s not ‘I’m going to do an interview with my brother’, it’s ‘I’m going to do an interview with the drummer’,” he recalled to NME. “When you get together, it’s never, ‘We are the band’. We lost that.

“There were a lot of moments when we weren’t talking. It was, ‘Man, we’ve become business partners. We haven’t maintained our friendship and our brotherhood, everything that we are.’”

Jared agreed with his sibling, admitting the privilege of being able to travel separately during tours meant they stopped spending time together. It got so bad they would only spend an hour-and-a-half in each other’s company before a gig, with Jared noting they went “too far in the other direction” to be successful.

“If you’re going to be friends and family, you can’t really be a band, or we can’t be this band,” he sighed of how they felt at the time.

The men worked hard to mend things when outing together their last album, 2013’s Mechanical Bull, but still stuck to their comfort zones. So for their new album Walls, due for release in October (16), Caleb and the gang knew things had to change.

“We’ve tried to peel that away on this album, by not using the same producer and doing it in our studio,” he explained. “We were really challenging ourselves, doing things where we were scratching our heads going ‘Holy s**t, is this right? Is this wrong?’”

Before the record’s release fans can tune into new single Waste A Moment, which hit the internet on Thursday(08Sep16).