“All these bands that take shots at us and say,
‘They don’t deserve this’—if they really realized how
much I agree with them, it would shock them.”

★ ★ ★ ★ CALEB FOLLOWILL

For Only by the Night, they recorded for the first time without Johns, who all the Followills agreed was a little too fatherly and not overly open to new ideas—a criticism Johns doesn’t deny.

“The guys wanted a different style, and they rightly got someone in there with a bit more patience,” he says, referring to Jacquire King, who produced the album with Petraglia. “There are certain elements of the rock’n’roll lifestyle I don’t believe should be brought into a studio. That’s not something I’d stick around for.”

Petraglia and King—who’d engineered Aha Shake Heartbreak, as well as records by Tom Waits and Modest Mouse—cultivated a more freewheeling vibe in the studio, for better and worse. “There was drinking and partying, and that promotes a fun atmosphere,” says King. “But sometimes it can create an aggressive atmosphere. The fact they’ve known each other all their lives, there’s no filters. They say whatever’s on their minds. Sometimes it’s hurtful. It gets heated.”

Speaking of assholes…,” Nathan says, just loudly enough for Caleb, sitting down with him and Baylin in a brightly lit Nashville pub, to hear. Nathan has been explaining his intensely close, sometimes combative relationship with Caleb, insisting it has more to do with being ultracompetitive brothers than ultracompetitive bandmates. They needle each other constantly. Sometimes, the needling escalates. Take last Thanksgiving, when what began as alcohol-fueled shit-talking became an all-out brawl. Nathan tackled Caleb into a wall, separating his younger brother’s shoulder. Caleb needed surgery, painkillers, and rehabilitation before he could play guitar again.

“To this day, I couldn’t tell you what we were fighting about,” Nathan says. His engagement to Baylin last year and some comments Caleb made about it during an interview also caused a rift, since patched up.

“In the beginning, it was a huge thing,” Nathan admits. “There was a $100,000 bet between me and

Caleb that Jessie wouldn’t be the last girl I was with.” The bet was a joke, but the underlying feelings were complicated. “Me and Caleb have lived together our whole lives. When our dad was preaching, we were in the car together. When we got out of school, we lived together. When the band started, we bought a house together. Then I fell in love with Jess, and it freaked him out. This way of life he’d known was gone.”

Later that afternoon, Caleb and I are alone on the patio of a Mexican restaurant across town, and I ask whether Nathan’s and Jared’s impending marriages have changed the band at all. He cracks a sly smile.

“Nobody’s getting married,” he says. “I hate to break it to you.” He is kidding—I think—but he readily admits to feeling a sense of abandonment when Nathan first got engaged. “People say it happens to younger brothers, but I’m completely dependent on him—or was, at that point. I was always altered in some way, so I had people holding my hand. When that happened, I was like, ‘Fuck,