The story of Kings of Leon

The preacher's sons

The Kings of Leon story begins on the road, in the back of a car. Ivan Leon Followill was a preacher in the United Pentecostal Church, and with his wife Betty-Ann he travelled the Deep South holding revival meetings that could last anywhere from three days to twelve weeks. Their eldest son Nathan was born in Oklahoma in June 1979. Caleb followed in January 1982 and Jared in November 1986, both born in and around Memphis. Their cousin Matthew, born in September 1984, grew up in Mississippi. For most of their childhood the family drove from one small town to the next in a purple 1988 Oldsmobile, camping for a week or two wherever the father had been booked to preach. The boys were mostly schooled at home by their mother.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Music came from the church, not the radio. At the services, Nathan played drums while his father played bass and his mother played piano, and worshippers danced in the aisles during the family's short sets. The boys grew up without television and were taught that popular music was the work of the devil, so what they heard was gospel, old soul and a little rhythm and blues. They were poor. Caleb and Nathan later remembered owning just two pairs of trousers each. Caleb told the Guardian that the constant moving made them colder, because it became easy to walk away from people. It also made the brothers inseparable. If they had something to tell a friend, they simply told each other instead.[1] [2] [3]

There was warmth too. Every Thanksgiving the wider family gathered for a reunion, with uncles and cousins standing waist deep in creek water fishing for catfish and bass. Their mother's sisters had all married preachers, and as a little boy Caleb assumed he would become one himself. Then, around 1997, the life fell apart. Ivan left the ministry and the parents divorced. The Los Angeles Times, reviewing the band's documentary years later, said the father's drinking had led to the split, while Caleb once put it more gently, saying his dad's nerves had got to him. Jared, still only about ten, settled in Oklahoma and for the first time went to a normal school. His older brothers headed for Nashville.[1] [2] [3]

A band built in a basement

In the Nashville area, Nathan and Caleb first tried their luck with country music and took some songs to a management company. There they met Angelo Petraglia, a songwriter born in the Bronx in 1954 who had once played in a new wave band called Face to Face and had written for country acts like Trisha Yearwood. Petraglia became their mentor and co-writer. He also filled the gaps in their education, pressing records by Thin Lizzy, the Rolling Stones and the Clash on two young men who had barely heard rock and roll. They later remembered getting stoned and listening to a Led Zeppelin box set, and realising in awe just how tight a real rock band had to be.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By 2002 the two brothers had attracted interest from several labels and signed with RCA, through the same team that had signed the Strokes. The label's first idea was to build a group of hired musicians around them. Nathan later told Billboard they refused, because they did not want to end up as a duo in the mould of Evan and Jaron. Instead they made RCA a promise. They would buy their little brother Jared a bass, Caleb would teach himself guitar, cousin Matthew would play lead because he had played guitar since he was ten, and Nathan would sit behind the drums. The label gave them a month. They named the band after their father and their grandfather, both called Leon.[1] [2]

Matthew's arrival has become family legend. Caleb liked to say they kidnapped their cousin from his home in Mississippi, telling his mother he was only coming to stay for a week and then never letting him go back. The four of them locked themselves in a basement for a month. Nathan said their mother brought food down to them. When the label people returned at the end of that month, the band had Molly's Chambers, California Waiting, Wicker Chair and Holy Roller Novocaine ready to play. The film maker Stephen Mitchell, who worked with the band from the start, later described how the older brothers had to buy Jared a bass so he could learn, and persuade Matthew to leave his own conservative family.[1] [2]

The first record, an EP called Holy Roller Novocaine, came out on the eighteenth of February 2003. Jared was sixteen and, by the band's own account, still had not really learned to play the bass. Every song was co-written by Petraglia, who also produced it, and Rolling Stone gave it four stars out of five. Three of its songs turned up in the Farrelly brothers' comedy Stuck on You. That same February the band played the Garage in London, where a Guardian critic noted that their youngest member was just sixteen. Their very first British show was even smaller. Jared remembered it as a gig for about one hundred and fifty people at the White Horse, a strip bar that doubled as a venue in Buckinghamshire.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Big in Britain

The debut album, Youth and Young Manhood, was released in Britain on the seventh of July 2003 and in America on the nineteenth of August. It was recorded in California at Shangri-La in Malibu and Sound City, and produced by Angelo Petraglia with Ethan Johns, the son of the famous engineer Glyn Johns. Britain went wild for it. NME called it one of the best debut albums of the previous ten years and it reached number three on the UK chart. At home it barely registered, peaking outside the top one hundred. By one count it sold about one hundred thousand copies in the United States against roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand abroad.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In late 2003 the band were opening for the Strokes in America, and a Guardian writer who travelled with them found four polite, soft spoken young men with long hair, moustaches and flared trousers. The album had already sold about three hundred thousand copies in the UK, where they were treated as rock stars, yet back in Tennessee nobody knew who they were. Caleb later laughed that they stuck out like a sore thumb among the country boys of Nashville, then landed in Britain to find everyone wearing the same moustache and trousers. In London they were soon hanging out with Kate Moss, and some writers began to wonder whether a story this colourful could possibly be true.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The second album, Aha Shake Heartbreak, arrived in Europe on the first of November 2004 and in America on the twenty second of February 2005. Ethan Johns recorded it at his Three Crows studio in Los Angeles, using the old Abbey Road mixing desk once used by the Beatles. The first single, The Bucket, reached number sixteen in Britain and became the band's first song to chart in America. It was written about Jared, still only seventeen, trying to cope with sudden fame. The album was darker and more debauched than the debut, and it is the only Kings of Leon record to carry a parental advisory sticker. Rolling Stone later ranked it among the best albums of its decade.[1] [2] [3]

Their peers were paying attention. Elvis Costello praised them, and in January 2005 Billboard revealed that Kings of Leon would open the first leg of U2's Vertigo world tour, starting in San Diego on the twenty eighth of March. Over 2005 and 2006 they also toured with Bob Dylan and Pearl Jam. Jared later recalled Eddie Vedder giving them a piece of advice early on, never to tour Europe for more than three weeks at a time, because that is what breaks bands up. The road came with excess. In 2007 Nathan admitted to the Guardian that the band had given up cocaine, joking that it made them too pale to look their mother in the face.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Because of the Times

The third album, Because of the Times, came out in Britain on the second of April 2007. Its title was borrowed, without the band realising at first, from a preachers' conference their family attended every year in Louisiana when they were children. Nathan said that when the penny dropped they swore, because they had finally escaped the religion thing and now they were right back in it. The record opened with Knocked Up, a seven minute song about young lovers expecting a baby, and it sounded bigger, darker and funkier than anything before. It went straight to number one in Britain and Ireland, selling around seventy thousand copies in its first week, and stayed on top the following week too.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The singles were On Call, which reached number eighteen in Britain, and Fans, which reached number thirteen and was openly a thank you to their British audience. Critics were split. NME said the album made them one of the great American bands of the era, while Pitchfork was scathing. Behind the scenes there were strains. Nathan had become engaged to the singer Jessie Baylin, and the band admitted it had caused friction, with Caleb saying he could not bring himself to talk to his brother's fiancee at first. Nathan also joked that some lyrics got written when Caleb had annoyed everybody by getting too drunk and was left alone for a few days to collect his thoughts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2007 Caleb met the model Lily Aldridge at the Coachella festival in California, a meeting that would reshape his life and inspire some of the band's biggest songs. That November the band began their first arena tour of Britain, opening in Dublin. They were already writing again, with songs for a fourth record taking shape at soundchecks while they toured. In February 2008 Glastonbury named Jay-Z, the Verve and Kings of Leon as its headliners for that summer. Organiser Emily Eavis pointed out that the band had played the festival several times, starting out in the new bands tent only a few years earlier.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Only by the Night

The fourth album was made fast, in early 2008 at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, with Petraglia now sharing production with Jacquire King, an engineer best known for Tom Waits. King recorded the band playing live onto sixteen track analog tape before moving to computers for overdubs. Critics noticed a band that had stopped mumbling and set its sights on stadiums. Only by the Night was released in September 2008 and entered the UK chart at number one, selling more than two hundred and twenty thousand copies in a week. That year only Coldplay's Viva la Vida had sold more in its first week. The first single had already done something new for them, reaching number one in Britain on downloads alone before it was even in the shops.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That single was Sex on Fire, and Caleb nearly threw it away. He told NME he had a melody but no words, sang the line about sex being on fire as a joke, and thought it was terrible, but the rest of the band insisted it had a hook. It became their first number one in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Finland. In the UK it spent ninety weeks on the chart, one of the longest runs of any single, dropping out only briefly in 2009 when Michael Jackson's death sent his records flooding back. By November 2012 it had sold one point two million copies in Britain. The song is often said to have been inspired by Lily Aldridge.[1] [2] [3]

The second single, Use Somebody, cracked America. It reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent fifty seven weeks on the chart. On radio it became only the fourth song in history to top the mainstream pop, adult pop, alternative and adult album alternative charts, following the Goo Goo Dolls, Sugar Ray and Green Day. Its video, directed by Sophie Muller, showed Caleb singing on a sofa high above the New York skyline. The album itself took forty eight weeks to climb to its American peak of number four and went double platinum there. In Australia it was the best selling album of 2008, and the band later said it had sold more than six million copies worldwide.[1] [2] [3]

The awards followed. In February 2009 Sex on Fire won the Grammy for best rock performance by a duo or group, and later that month the band won best international group and best international album at the Brit Awards in London. On the thirtieth of June 2009 they filmed a sold out show for more than eighteen thousand people at London's O2 Arena for their first live film. Then, on the thirty first of January 2010, Use Somebody won three more Grammys, including record of the year. Success brought squabbles about money too. In 2009 Jared joked that when Caleb started writing an album alone, the others rushed round to his house so he could not claim most of the royalties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pigeons, Glee and Dallas

The year 2010 brought a run of strange and sad moments. In May, floods devastated Nashville, and Nathan said it was heartbreaking to see his city in such bad shape. In June the band headlined the thirtieth anniversary concert at Slane Castle in Ireland, on a bill that also featured Thin Lizzy, but days before the show Jared posted that his uncle Cleo had died and that he was an absolute mess. They played with heavy hearts. Then on the twenty third of July, at an amphitheatre outside St. Louis, pigeons nesting in the rafters rained droppings on the stage. After three songs Jared was hit on the cheek, close to his mouth, and the band walked off. Their manager called it a toxic health hazard.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The fans who had been at the pigeon show were given their money back and free tickets to a makeup concert that September. A month later, on the eighteenth of October 2010, came the fifth album, Come Around Sundown, again produced by Jacquire King and Angelo Petraglia. The lead single Radioactive had a sepia video of the band at a barbecue with a gospel children's choir, which Nathan called a return to their roots. The album reached number one in several countries, including Britain, where its first week set a record for digital album sales, and number two in America. Yet in the US it sold far less than Only by the Night, and Caleb later admitted he had been checked out for the whole campaign.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In early 2011 the band turned down a request from the hit television musical Glee to use their songs, saying they had a policy against licensing music to TV series and adverts. The show's creator Ryan Murphy responded by publicly calling them self centred and worse. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters later took their side. In April the documentary Talihina Sky, named after a hidden track on their debut, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It set the drink, drugs and screaming fans of rock stardom against the backwoods Oklahoma world they came from. On the twelfth of May 2011, Caleb married Lily Aldridge in a small family ceremony at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, California.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

On the twentieth of June 2011 the Jackass star Ryan Dunn was killed in a car crash, and at their concert in London's Hyde Park the band dedicated McFearless to him. Then came the worst night of their career. On the twenty ninth of July 2011, at the Gexa Energy Pavilion in Dallas, Caleb told the crowd his voice was gone, insisted he was not drunk, just hot, and said he was going backstage to vomit, have a beer and come back for three more songs. He never came back. Jared told the audience to blame Caleb, not the band. Nathan wrote that he was ashamed and embarrassed by the fiasco.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next night's show in Houston was cancelled, and on the first of August the band scrapped the rest of the American tour. Their representatives blamed vocal problems and exhaustion, but Jared wrote on Twitter that there were internal sicknesses and problems that needed to be addressed, bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade. Reports said insurers at Lloyd's of London could face claims of up to fifteen million dollars. On the thirty first of October the band announced a break after their Australian dates. Years later Caleb described it as a dark period and called himself a bit of a boozehound at the time, and NME reported that he had received treatment for alcohol addiction after the tour was cancelled.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Starting again

The break did not last long. In August 2012 Jared released a song called No Tell with Nick Brown of the Nashville band Mona under the name Smoke and Jackal, and when fans asked if Kings of Leon were finished he replied that it was not even close. The families were growing. Caleb and Lily's daughter Dixie Pearl was born in June 2012, and Nathan and Jessie Baylin's daughter Violet arrived that December. The sixth album, Mechanical Bull, was released on the twenty fourth of September 2013, led by the single Supersoaker. Caleb said the pressure was gone, because Come Around Sundown had already taken the monkey off their back. The album entered at number one in Britain and number two in America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Mechanical Bull became the first Kings of Leon album to sell more copies in America than in Britain. The video for Beautiful War starred the actor Garrett Hedlund in a tribute to the rodeo rider Lane Frost, and NME called the single Temple the best thing the band had written in five years. Touring brought fresh oddities. In April 2014 health officials in Washington state warned fans at a Seattle show to check their vaccinations after a woman with measles attended. When the band played St James' Park in Newcastle that summer, the Guardian noted a giant canopy over the stage, presumably to guard against more attacks from above.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For the seventh album the band made a decision that surprised many. They felt their long partnership with Angelo Petraglia, who had produced every album so far, had become too safe, so they hired Markus Dravs, known for his work with Arcade Fire and Mumford and Sons. They moved their families to Los Angeles and recorded at Henson Studios. Dravs was a stern taskmaster. Jared recalled him simply telling them when a song was not good enough, making them write new verses on the spot, or suddenly ordering them to play a slow song like the Sex Pistols. The band kept the album secret until a couple of months before release, and one song, Over, dealt with Caleb's addiction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Walls came out on the fourteenth of October 2016. The title stood for We Are Like Love Songs, which kept alive a tradition fans had spotted, that every album title had five syllables. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, their first American chart topper, and also reached number one in Britain, Ireland and New Zealand. The lead single Waste a Moment became their first number one on the alternative chart since 2010, and the song Reverend was written as a tribute to the late country songwriter Blaze Foley. By now, Billboard reported, all four men were married and the kids of three of them went to the same school. In January 2019 Caleb and Lily's son Winston Roy was born.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Grown men, new beginnings

On the thirty first of March 2020, early in the pandemic, the band shared an acoustic performance of a new song called Going Nowhere, later renamed Supermarket, which Caleb said dated back to his drinking days. The eighth album, When You See Yourself, was again produced by Markus Dravs, this time at the band's own base in Nashville, and its release was pushed back a year by Covid before it finally arrived on the fifth of March 2021. Caleb told the Guardian that for the first time ever they had made a record without any fistfights. Nathan joked that the fighting was now left to their eight year old daughters. It was their final studio album for RCA.[1] [2] [3]

When You See Yourself also made the band pioneers of a strange new market. They became the first band to release a new album as a non fungible token, a kind of digital collectible. A fifty dollar token included a digital download and limited edition vinyl, and a small number of golden tickets promised four front row seats at every Kings of Leon tour for life. One of the band's tokens was later sent into space on the all civilian Inspiration4 mission as part of a charity auction. Reviews of the album were mixed. Rolling Stone liked its brooding mood, while the Guardian called it the sound of a band fresh out of ideas.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then tragedy struck close to home. Their mother Betty-Ann, whose warning had once been enough to stop any fight at the band's rowdy Sunday barbecues, died suddenly in 2021. The brothers later said her death brought them closer together and gave them a new sense of purpose. With their RCA contract finished, they went independent, and two nights at the Racecourse Ground in Wrexham, Wales, in May 2023 were recorded for release as Live in Wrexham. In February 2024 they announced a deal with Capitol Records, releasing through LoveTap Records. The ninth album, Can We Please Have Fun, came out on the tenth of May 2024, produced by Kid Harpoon, best known for his work with Harry Styles.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The title of Can We Please Have Fun started as Caleb's frustrated plea to get back to making music that made them happy, and he called it the most enjoyable record he had ever made. Nathan said they had allowed themselves to be musically vulnerable. The lead single Mustang was widely compared to their early sound. Then, in May 2025, Caleb shattered his heel in what he called a freak accident while playing with his children in Nashville. He needed emergency surgery and was told he could not travel or perform for about eight weeks, so the band cancelled their British and European summer shows, including a headline slot at Lytham festival. Caleb said they had been recording a batch of new songs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After the injury the band kept busy. According to Consequence, they guested on Zach Bryan's song Bowery, surprise released a new EP, and in 2026 played New Orleans Jazz Fest, a British tour and a headline set at Mad Cool in Madrid. On the tenth of September 2026 they announced their tenth album, O My Beloved, due on the sixth of November on Love Tap Records. It is their first self produced record, thirteen songs looking back at family, childhood and the road that brought them here, led by the gentle single My Whole World. That night they played a tiny show at the Basement East in Nashville. As of 2026 they have won four Grammys from twelve nominations.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Kings of Leon

Caleb Followill and Lily Aldridge. Caleb met the model Lily Aldridge at Coachella in 2007, and Sex on Fire is widely described as being written about her. She appeared in the band's videos for Use Somebody and Temple. They married on the twelfth of May 2011 at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, California. Their daughter Dixie Pearl was born in 2012 and their son Winston Roy in January 2019. The Walls song Find Me grew from her story of a haunted hotel.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Nathan Followill and Jessie Baylin. Nathan's engagement to the singer and songwriter Jessie Baylin in 2007 caused some awkwardness inside the band, and Caleb admitted he found it hard to talk to her at first. They married on the fourteenth of November 2009 at a farm in Brentwood, Tennessee, and their daughter Violet was born on the twenty sixth of December 2012. Baylin has kept releasing her own albums from Nashville.[1] [2]

Matthew Followill and Johanna Bennett. Matthew married the English musician Johanna Bennett in 2009, and they live in Nashville with their children. Before that, Bennett had fronted a band called Totalizer and, while dating Alex Turner, had co-written the Arctic Monkeys hit Fluorescent Adolescent, whose lyrics came out of a word game on holiday. It gives the quiet cousin of the band an unexpected link to one of Britain's biggest groups.[1]

Caleb Followill and Jared Followill. The eldest and youngest songwriting brothers have clashed publicly more than once. Jared once said Caleb wanted them to lie about the very things that made them charming, and joked about rushing to Caleb's house so he could not grab the royalties. On the night Caleb walked off stage in Dallas in 2011, Jared told the crowd to blame Caleb, and then hinted online at deeper problems. By 2021 the band said the fights were behind them.[1] [2] [3]

Kings of Leon and Angelo Petraglia. Petraglia was the band's mentor, co-writer and producer from the very start. He met Caleb and Nathan in Nashville, introduced them to Thin Lizzy, the Stones and the Clash, co-wrote every song on the first EP and co-produced their first six albums. In 2016 the band decided the partnership had grown too safe and moved on to Markus Dravs. Petraglia's songs have also been recorded by Trisha Yearwood, Emmylou Harris and Taylor Swift.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kings of Leon and Ethan Johns. The English producer Ethan Johns, son of the legendary engineer Glyn Johns, co-produced the first two albums with Petraglia. Aha Shake Heartbreak was recorded at his Three Crows studio in Los Angeles on the Beatles' old Abbey Road desk, and he played piano and keyboards on it. Johns went on to win the Brit Award for best British producer in 2012.[1] [2] [3]

Kings of Leon and Jacquire King. Jacquire King, who had engineered Tom Waits's Mule Variations, co-produced Only by the Night and Come Around Sundown with Petraglia in Nashville. He recorded the band live to analog tape and even played keyboards on Use Somebody. The Grammy for record of the year in 2010 was shared with King as engineer, mixer and co-producer. He later worked with Zach Bryan, among many others.[1] [2]

Kings of Leon and Markus Dravs. Markus Dravs, the producer behind Arcade Fire, Coldplay and Mumford and Sons records, was brought in to shake the band up for Walls in 2016. He questioned every song and routine, and the band came to call him a genius. Walls became their first album to top the charts in Britain and America at the same time, and Dravs also produced the follow up, When You See Yourself, in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kings of Leon and Kid Harpoon. The English producer Kid Harpoon, famous for Harry Styles's Harry's House and Miley Cyrus's Flowers, produced Can We Please Have Fun in 2024 at Dark Horse studio near Nashville. It was his first time working with the band. Critics who disliked the lyrics still praised his sharp production, and the album brought back some of the energy of their early records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kings of Leon and Ryan Murphy. When the band politely refused to let the television show Glee use their songs in 2011, its creator Ryan Murphy lashed out, calling them self centred in coarser language. Dave Grohl publicly sided with the band. The brothers later made a guest appearance in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in an episode that mocked Glee.[1] [2] [3]

Kings of Leon and The Features. The Tennessee band the Features toured Britain with Kings of Leon many times. In 2009 the Followills launched their own label, Serpents and Snakes, largely to sign them, and released their records. Caleb once said he was so nervous the first time he saw them play that he was sick behind the venue, convinced his band could not follow them.[1] [2]

The Followill brothers and Betty-Ann Followill. Their mother Betty-Ann schooled the boys at home, played piano at their father's services and told them to stay sweet whenever they left. Caleb said that if she ever stepped into one of their fights, they knew it was time to stop. She died suddenly in 2021, and the brothers said her loss drew them closer and helped spark the joy of Can We Please Have Fun.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Kings of Leon

• The song title Molly's Chambers comes from Thin Lizzy's version of the Irish folk song Whiskey in the Jar. Molly's chambers is old slang for a brothel. Years later, at Slane Castle in 2010, Kings of Leon headlined a bill that included Thin Lizzy themselves.[1] [2]
• Aha Shake Heartbreak was recorded using the Beatles' old Abbey Road mixing desk. Ethan Johns owned the desk at his Three Crows studio in Los Angeles, where the band made their second album in 2004.[1]
• Aha Shake Heartbreak is the only Kings of Leon album with a parental advisory sticker. The label went on because of swearing in four songs, including Taper Jean Girl and Four Kicks.[1]
• A photo of the band as children is hidden under the CD tray of Aha Shake Heartbreak. Both the British and American editions, which had different orchid covers, include the childhood picture beneath the plastic tray that holds the disc.[1]
• On Aha Shake Heartbreak the band credited themselves as pipes, skins, slaps and licks. Caleb was credited for pipes, meaning vocals, Nathan for skins on drums, Jared for slaps on bass and Matthew for licks on lead guitar.[1]
• Every studio album title from the debut to 2024 has five syllables. Fans spotted the pattern early. When Walls was announced in 2016 it seemed to break the rule, until the band revealed it stood for We Are Like Love Songs.[1] [2]
• Because of the Times was named after a preachers' conference the brothers attended as children. The band did not realise the connection at first. Nathan said when they did, they were dismayed to be dragged back to the religion they had left behind.[1]
• Kings of Leon's first British gig was at a strip bar venue in Buckinghamshire. Jared remembered playing to about one hundred and fifty people at the White Horse. Matthew was seventeen and had never been out of the country.[1]
• Only by the Night became the UK's biggest selling digital album ever in early 2009. In February 2009 it overtook Amy Winehouse's Back to Black. By October 2016 it had sold almost three million copies in Britain.[1]
• Sex on Fire was number one in Britain before it was even released as a physical single. It reached the top on downloads alone in September 2008. By September 2009 it was the second most downloaded single ever in the UK.[1] [2]
• Sex on Fire and Use Somebody both fell off the UK chart because of Michael Jackson's death. Both songs had been on the chart without a break until June 2009, when a surge in Jackson sales pushed them out. Both soon returned.[1] [2]
• Use Somebody was only the fourth song ever to top four different American radio charts. It reached number one on the mainstream pop, adult pop, alternative and adult album alternative charts, after hits by the Goo Goo Dolls, Sugar Ray and Green Day.[1]
• Notion was the first Kings of Leon single to miss the UK top one hundred. Despite heavy BBC Radio 1 play it peaked at number one hundred and seven in 2009, even while topping the American alternative chart.[1]
• Beyonce covered Sex on Fire during her 2011 Glastonbury headline set. Her version was widely praised. A Dutch carnival parody of the song was later certified platinum in the Netherlands.[1]
• The video for The Bucket censored a single word because of its dark meaning. The song about Jared coping with fame at seventeen includes a line about swinging his legs, which was read as a reference to hanging, so that word was bleeped.[1]
• The Four Kicks video features the band's cousin Nacho, who worked as their guitar tech. Christopher Nacho Followill was described in 2003 as an honorary band member and was a constant presence backstage.[1] [2]
• Caleb said Pyro grew out of a news story about radical Christians killed after an FBI standoff. He described writing about a man fed up with the world who decides to burn it down, and the piece he watched is widely taken to be about Ruby Ridge.[1]
• The Walls song Reverend was written as a tribute to the country songwriter Blaze Foley. The song came out as a promotional single in October 2016 and was sent to American alternative radio as a single the following February.[1]
• The band dedicated McFearless to Jackass star Ryan Dunn after his death in 2011. They played the tribute at their concert in London's Hyde Park, soon after Dunn was killed in a car crash on the twentieth of June 2011.[1]
• A woman with measles attended a Kings of Leon concert in Seattle in 2014. Washington state health officials told everyone at the Key Arena show to check they were vaccinated.[1]
• Their cancelled 2011 tour could have cost insurers at Lloyd's of London up to fifteen million dollars. The figure was reported after the Dallas walk off. Around the same time, management had fan footage of the show taken off YouTube.[1]
• A Rolling Stone issue with the band on the cover was once a prize on The Price Is Right. Talihina Sky shows how phone lines in their family's Oklahoma hometown lit up when relatives saw it on television.[1]
• Kings of Leon helped found Nashville's annual Music City Food and Wine Festival. Billboard described all four as serious foodies with investments in restaurants and real estate.[1]
• They were the first band to release a new album as a non fungible token. Some golden ticket tokens for When You See Yourself promised four front row seats at every future tour for life, plus a driver and a backstage hangout.[1]
• A Kings of Leon token was launched into space. One of the band's digital tokens flew on the all civilian Inspiration4 mission as part of a charity auction, and it was also displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1]
• A DNA test showed the Followills are about a quarter Irish. The band told an audience in Dublin in 2017 that they had taken the test, a fitting result for a group adored in Ireland.[1]
• After Northern Ireland's Euro 2016 win in Lyon, the players were nicknamed the Kings of Lyon. The side won their first ever match at the tournament against Ukraine on the sixteenth of June 2016.[1]
• The band's version of California Waiting on their first EP is the one Caleb prefers. The track was rerecorded for the debut album, but on VH1 Storytellers Caleb said they had sabotaged it by playing it too punk, and the EP version was better.[1]
• Mechanical Bull was their first album to sell more in America than in Britain. It opened at number two in the US with one hundred and ten thousand copies and at number one in the UK in 2013.[1]
• Walls suffered one of the biggest ever drops from number one on the Billboard 200. It fell straight from number one to number twenty in its second week in 2016, the tenth largest drop from the top at the time.[1]
• The Only by the Night opener Closer is built on a bass riff Jared plays through a multi effects pedal. He used a Boss pedal to add an octave sweep that sounds similar to a DigiTech Whammy.[1]
• Beautiful War's video pays tribute to the rodeo champion Lane Frost. The actor Garrett Hedlund plays a cowboy in the clip, and even the county where his character is jailed is named Lane.[1]
• The Aha Shake Heartbreak album appeared in an episode of The Mighty Boosh. According to the Observer, Noel Fielding's character reportedly used a copy of the album as a mirror to signal for help.[1]
• O My Beloved, due in November 2026, is the first album the band have produced themselves. Its thirteen songs look back at childhood and family, and it follows a surprise EP and a collaboration with Zach Bryan.[1] [2]
• Eddie Vedder advised them never to tour Europe for more than three weeks at a time. Jared remembered the Pearl Jam singer warning early on that long European tours break up bands.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.