“It’s kind of changed the game for me as far as how I want to approach songwriting from here on in.” “I think I stepped up in a way that I haven’t done in a few records,” he says.
With a year now passed between the album’s completion and release, Followill credits his ability to employ third-person narrative as a storytelling tool with reinvigorating his love of songwriting, opening up a new rich vein of “raw emotion” lyricism. Such admissions constitute a maturation for the 39-year-old. “Close your еyes and what do you see: Is it a man or masked machine?” he asks on the forlorn “Time in Disguise.” It’s a distinction Followill addresses on the album. I love the stage, but I don’t like to be recognized when I get off it.” “A lot of frontmen live for the spotlight.
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For someone who’s had not one but two yacht-based injuries, Followill feels oddly uncomfortable in the skin of a rock star. In both cases, the masking resulted in commercial success, both justifying his own deep-seated unease and exacerbating his destructive and extravagant tendencies. Later, when U2 and Pearl Jam took the group under their wing, he hid his discomfort with arena rock by aping their sonic styles and lyrical generalities.
On the band’s first two albums, he did this by disguising his voice, which possesses a mellifluous timbre capable of manifesting country, gospel and rock in a single elongated vowel, behind a yelping drawl, and often obstructing his face behind a bushy beard. For nearly 20 years, he’s diligently evolved the art of concealing himself in the spotlight. Not naturally inclined toward self-revelation, the struggle to be true while not exposing too much is a touchstone of Followill’s output. I feel like it (allowed me to open up) while not coming off in a cheesy way.” “In the process of singing songs about these made-up characters I noticed after the fact that it allowed me to kind of pepper my personal stories throughout. “I feel like I’ve always tried to shy away from being too obvious in songs when something’s about me,” he says.
For the notoriously obtuse frontman, this meant summoning proxy protagonists onto which he could subconsciously project his lived experience. “I promise on the next album I’m gonna write about some really happy times,” he adds with a laugh.Īs the title suggests, “When You See Yourself” is an album steeped in reflection and the value of “taking a look at yourself every now and then,” Followill explains. “I don’t know what was happening that made me take that guard down on this record, but I’m glad I did because now it will have a little more meaning. Temporarily cut off from his immediate family, he did the only thing he could think of to express himself: he put his experience to music.Ī decade later, the resulting song, “Fairytale,” has found its way onto the band’s eighth album, “When You See Yourself.” It’s one of several “deeply personal” tracks that Followill says he put immense pressure on himself to complete for the album, which was recorded pre-pandemic yet, both atmospherically and thematically, echoes many of the solitary, amorphous realities of our modern life. “That was a really dark, sad period in my life,” he recalls. Waking up the next morning, he found himself inexplicably back in his Nashville home with the rest of the band’s tour cancelled. But it was the reaction of the rest of the group, of not following him off, that gave Followill a deeper understanding of his circumstances. His was the first move: literally walking offstage in Dallas, too inebriated or exhausted to continue. In July of 2011, Caleb Followill walked away from the Kings of Leon, the group he’s fronted alongside his brothers and their cousin since the early aughts.
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