In 2005, Kings Of Leon opened for U2 on their Vertigo tour. Leave it to the Irish band that idolizes the idea of Americana to change the way an actual American band approaches their music. Even Bob Dylan invited them on tour after hearing KOL’s questionably titled “Trani,” which he called a “hell of a song.” It didn’t take long before these songs got the attention of big guns like Elvis Costello and Eddie Vedder. On the outside it played rough, but underneath these whiskey-soaked Southern rock romps were confident rock ‘n’ roll anthems, hidden behind Caleb’s shit-scorched vocal delivery and the sparse production of it all. Their first two albums - Youth And Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak - still hold up today (“Four Kicks” rips), and in sticking with the Strokes comparison, they’re also probably the two best of their discography. They were somewhat of an outlier in the garage-rock revival of those days. Here were these scraggly lookin’ dudes in tight-ass jeans from the US South who, while they weren’t getting hammered and fighting with each other, played jangly, deep-fried-Strokes Southern boogie. Overseas, fans ate up everything KOL had to offer: the image, the story, and the music. In the early days, the band found more success in the UK than on US soil. They form a band called Kings Of Leon with their cousin Matt, and find early critical acclaim, despite half the band being barely old enough to drive. The idea of who they were and where they came from was the selling point before the actual music.īy now, you know the story: Caleb, Nathan, and Jared Followill, three sons of a Pentecostal preacher, who spent their sheltered childhoods traveling around the Deep South from church to church, break free from that life to find sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
For the Kings Of Leon, the myth about them was always more exciting than the real thing.
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