Kings of Leon’s New Album -
Come Around Sundown
Kings of Leon’s have officially hit number one with their 5th album ‘Come Around Sundown’ released on 18-10-2010 on the first week of release. The record-breaking release has hit the biggest first week of digital sales in chart history of 183,000.
Kings of Leon released ‘Radioactive’ on the 4th October, which also hit number one for 3 consecutive weeks. The ‘Radioactive’ video has had lots of speculation; “At various points it resembles Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’, a Center Parcs ad, and a Comic Relief field report in which Lenny Henry or Griff Rhys Jones crouch in the dusty soil and bring simple joy to the faces of the locals.” Other comments criticized “s this the same band who, in the pages of NME just a few weeks ago, boasted of their ability to fill a hotel room with girls and a “mountain of cocaine” at the drop of a plectrum? Why are they suddenly acting like Scout leaders on a bivouacking trip?” But the criticism on their new single didn’t stop it from going straight to number one.
The Followill family have appeared on our TV screens more than a few times being interviewed on their new released album including; ITV2 Kings of Leon exclusive, Clashmusic, Fuse, MusicOMH, and exclusive interview with our Newspapers/magazines like Mirror, NME, The Guardian, Contactmusic. They have also posted interviews explaining each song on their new album on their website.
The design of ‘Come around Sundown’ is very simple which is almost exciting, to see what their music is going to sound like. Come around sundown obviously means so many different things to the boys, which could be a reason for why their cover is so simple. The format of their writing is very small and simple, as if they want you to focus on such an eye-catching background. The way the background displays palm trees, and calm sea, with the sun setting, gives an overall calm atmosphere to the cover itself, which makes you wonder ‘will the cover reflect their music?’. It’s doesn’t give the expected image of the worlds biggest current rock band.
The cover could also give off certain messages that someday all they want to do is relax and not travel around the world.
Kings of Leon was signed to RCA a major record label joint to Sony Music Entertainment. When you look at their website the only thing that that connects to their record label is the copyright & design at the bottom.
The boy’s website includes a mini biography giving information about the band before and after they formed. The ‘bio’ part of the website gives insight of each album they made and what styles they bring, and how successful the albums were. It also highlights successful songs that have topped the charts over the years. The website makes it clear that the Followill family made all their own music and there ambitions and instincts made them something special.
There has been many press releases for the new album, but a basic insight gives you information about each song on the new album explaining what they was thinking while writing the song, how they came up with the melody riffs etc. Also they explain the feelings they were going through and why it might have a certain effect on how the song turned out. They also discuss the album name and why they chose that name.
Kings of Leon target such a wide audience of rock. Even though the boys tamper with other genres with their gospel influences their music is so different from what other bands are doing at the minute. And this is why they have sold 12,830 000 albums, and have gone platinum 47 times!
Kings of Leon interviewed by New York Times
A SWEATY June night in Tennessee was one more milestone for Kings of Leon: headlining a major American rock festival in their home state. On June 10 they topped the bill at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, about 54 miles from where the band members grew up, in Franklin. Kings of Leon’s band members are the three sons of a preacher named Leon Followill — Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill — and their cousin Matthew Followill; they are now based in Nashville.
“We live just down the road,” Caleb Followill, the band’s lead singer, told the tens of thousands of Bonnaroo fans who were whooping and squealing and singing along on songs like “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” which won the Grammy award in 2009 for record of the year. Those songs, from Kings of Leon’s 2008 album, “Only by the Night,” which sold nearly two million copies, had turned a grungy, nervy Southern rock band into full-fledged American hit makers. Mike Kaplan, program director of the Seatle alternative rock station known as The End (KNDD, 107.7 FM), said, “That album has taken them from the indie world to being a band the suburbs feel cool knowing about.” For Kings of Leon that’s a commercial but unsettling position.
“I didn’t want the world to start to hate us because every time you’d turn on the radio, you’d hear one of our songs,” said Caleb Followill, 28, by telephone from Los Angeles. To avoid overexposure Kings of Leon turned down offers, for example, to appear on “Ugly Betty” or to have one of their songs performed on “Glee.”
The next Kings of Leon album, “Come Around Sundown,” is scheduled to be released by RCA on Oct. 19, when it is likely to shape up as the rock blockbuster of the new season. Yet it’s not a pat rerun of “Only by the Night” or a smug victory lap. When Mr. Followill spoke about the album, he kept mentioning a different emotion: fear. “I just got worried that the success was going to ruin what we’d been working hard for so long,” he said.
Kings of Leon have played Bonnaroo repeatedly since 2004, moving up from an afternoon set in a tent to successively larger stages, all the way to prime-slot headliner. Onstage in June their former T-shirts and blue jeans had been replaced by coordinated Burberry plaids and earth tones; a wall of bright lights flashed behind them. During encores the normally laconic Caleb Followill made a little speech: “There are very few times in my life when I’ve really felt like I was really, really proud of what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished. And this is one of those times. I just want to say thank you to everybody who’s been there with us since we were on the small stage.”
That gratitude was wary and double-edged: directed to loyalists rather than pop latecomers. Until 2008 Kings of Leon had been making their reputation in steady increments, building an American audience concert by concert. One of the new songs they sang at Bonnaroo was “The Immortals,” an anthem that calls for honesty and courage: “Fear is a danger,” it advises.
In the interview Mr. Followill said the song was “the way that I want to talk to my children.” But, he added, its first words — “The open road, the path of greatness, is at your fingers/Go be the one that keeps on fighting, go be the stranger” — speak “definitely to myself.” Kings of Leon’s first album, “Youth and Young Manhood” in 2003, had a scrappy energy that drew comparisons to the Strokes, the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground and the Allman Brothers. The band drew early praise from U2 and Pearl Jam, both of which also booked them to open tours. They “took us under their wings and showed us what it was like to play in an arena,” Mr. Followill said. “Because they saw we had potential to one day break through.”
Album by album Kings of Leon’s music grew more intricate and cleanly detailed. And as the band took to the arena circuit, it soaked up the sounds and pacing of its tour mates, learning to let songs ring in large spaces. The music, though still limber, slowed down from the garage-punk rush of the first album.
Caleb Followill began to carve out longer melody lines for his voice, while the instruments found room to breathe and reverberate, meshing across greater distances. And the lust, sleaze and recklessness of the band’s early lyrics were joined, though not replaced, by romance and reflections on sin and tenacity.
The band was evolving toward pop. When Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam heard “Only by the Night,” he said, “You’re about to ride a big wave,” Caleb Followill told Spin magazine.
“We definitely don’t sound as raw as we did early on,” Mr. Followill said from Los Angeles. “But that’s just because it’s hard to teach yourself to be a bad guitar player again. A lot of that raw energy came from — we were playing as good as we could, and now our good is a little better than that.”
The band tried to shake itself out of its routine for the new album. It had recorded before in Los Angeles and Tennessee; “Come Around Sundown” was made in a Midtown Manhattan studio. Various songs drew on ideas from all four previous albums. “The fears that we did have were people just knowing us for our last record,” Mr. Followill said. “We tried to show them at least moments of everything we’ve done along the way.”
“We live just down the road,” Caleb Followill, the band’s lead singer, told the tens of thousands of Bonnaroo fans who were whooping and squealing and singing along on songs like “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” which won the Grammy award in 2009 for record of the year. Those songs, from Kings of Leon’s 2008 album, “Only by the Night,” which sold nearly two million copies, had turned a grungy, nervy Southern rock band into full-fledged American hit makers. Mike Kaplan, program director of the Seatle alternative rock station known as The End (KNDD, 107.7 FM), said, “That album has taken them from the indie world to being a band the suburbs feel cool knowing about.” For Kings of Leon that’s a commercial but unsettling position.
“I didn’t want the world to start to hate us because every time you’d turn on the radio, you’d hear one of our songs,” said Caleb Followill, 28, by telephone from Los Angeles. To avoid overexposure Kings of Leon turned down offers, for example, to appear on “Ugly Betty” or to have one of their songs performed on “Glee.”
The next Kings of Leon album, “Come Around Sundown,” is scheduled to be released by RCA on Oct. 19, when it is likely to shape up as the rock blockbuster of the new season. Yet it’s not a pat rerun of “Only by the Night” or a smug victory lap. When Mr. Followill spoke about the album, he kept mentioning a different emotion: fear. “I just got worried that the success was going to ruin what we’d been working hard for so long,” he said.
Kings of Leon have played Bonnaroo repeatedly since 2004, moving up from an afternoon set in a tent to successively larger stages, all the way to prime-slot headliner. Onstage in June their former T-shirts and blue jeans had been replaced by coordinated Burberry plaids and earth tones; a wall of bright lights flashed behind them. During encores the normally laconic Caleb Followill made a little speech: “There are very few times in my life when I’ve really felt like I was really, really proud of what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished. And this is one of those times. I just want to say thank you to everybody who’s been there with us since we were on the small stage.”
That gratitude was wary and double-edged: directed to loyalists rather than pop latecomers. Until 2008 Kings of Leon had been making their reputation in steady increments, building an American audience concert by concert. One of the new songs they sang at Bonnaroo was “The Immortals,” an anthem that calls for honesty and courage: “Fear is a danger,” it advises.
In the interview Mr. Followill said the song was “the way that I want to talk to my children.” But, he added, its first words — “The open road, the path of greatness, is at your fingers/Go be the one that keeps on fighting, go be the stranger” — speak “definitely to myself.” Kings of Leon’s first album, “Youth and Young Manhood” in 2003, had a scrappy energy that drew comparisons to the Strokes, the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground and the Allman Brothers. The band drew early praise from U2 and Pearl Jam, both of which also booked them to open tours. They “took us under their wings and showed us what it was like to play in an arena,” Mr. Followill said. “Because they saw we had potential to one day break through.”
Album by album Kings of Leon’s music grew more intricate and cleanly detailed. And as the band took to the arena circuit, it soaked up the sounds and pacing of its tour mates, learning to let songs ring in large spaces. The music, though still limber, slowed down from the garage-punk rush of the first album.
Caleb Followill began to carve out longer melody lines for his voice, while the instruments found room to breathe and reverberate, meshing across greater distances. And the lust, sleaze and recklessness of the band’s early lyrics were joined, though not replaced, by romance and reflections on sin and tenacity.
The band was evolving toward pop. When Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam heard “Only by the Night,” he said, “You’re about to ride a big wave,” Caleb Followill told Spin magazine.
“We definitely don’t sound as raw as we did early on,” Mr. Followill said from Los Angeles. “But that’s just because it’s hard to teach yourself to be a bad guitar player again. A lot of that raw energy came from — we were playing as good as we could, and now our good is a little better than that.”
The band tried to shake itself out of its routine for the new album. It had recorded before in Los Angeles and Tennessee; “Come Around Sundown” was made in a Midtown Manhattan studio. Various songs drew on ideas from all four previous albums. “The fears that we did have were people just knowing us for our last record,” Mr. Followill said. “We tried to show them at least moments of everything we’ve done along the way.”
http://www.kingsofleon.com/home
http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/search/default.html?Filter=kings%20of%20leon
http://www.nme.com/news/kings-of-leon/53498
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/14/kings-of-leon-come-around-sundown-review
http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/search/default.html?Filter=kings%20of%20leon
http://www.nme.com/news/kings-of-leon/53498
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/14/kings-of-leon-come-around-sundown-review
here is a few websites i have looked at through my essay...
Here Kings of Leon begin to talk about the album title and what it means to them, in later parts of the interview they talk about each song on the album and what experience they went through making the song.
In this interview theres a sense or 'nervousness' for i dont think they really know what come around sundown really means as a whole group, it means different things to each of them as they try to explain.
Here Kings of Leon begin to talk about the album title and what it means to them, in later parts of the interview they talk about each song on the album and what experience they went through making the song.
In this interview theres a sense or 'nervousness' for i dont think they really know what come around sundown really means as a whole group, it means different things to each of them as they try to explain.
Here Kings of Leon begin to talk about the album title and what it means to them, in later parts of the interview they talk about each song on the album and what experience they went through making the song.
In this interview theres a sense or 'nervousness' for i dont think they really know what come around sundown really means as a whole group, it means different things to each of them as they try to explain.
Here Kings of Leon begin to talk about the album title and what it means to them, in later parts of the interview they talk about each song on the album and what experience they went through making the song.
In this interview theres a sense or 'nervousness' for i dont think they really know what come around sundown really means as a whole group, it means different things to each of them as they try to explain.
