what do I do? Where am I going to live?’ ”

Caleb says his overarching fear that serious relationships—not just Nathan’s and Jared’s, but his own, as well—would compromise the band’s focus, work ethic, and creative juice hasn’t entirely dissipated. “Certain things about relationships are good for the artist, as far as keeping you grounded,” he says. “But as far as the art goes, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of people get so grounded that they just can’t get back to the level that was the reason everyone loved them so much. The honesty gets sucked out of you, because you’re always watching your words. You start to feel like you should be making music for one person, as opposed to for the masses or yourself.”

Caleb has coped with this by mostly ditching the confessional writing style that defined his early lyrics in favor of impressionistic portraits of strangers. The notable exception on Only by the Night is “Cold Desert,” a gorgeous, melancholy dirge featuring harrowing couplets like “Jesus don’t love me, no one ever carried my load / I’m too young to feel this old.” The lines could easily come off whiny or melodramatic, but Caleb imbues them with the sort of existential ache that lets listeners know that, these days, the guy who once wrote songs about getting too drunk to fuck is following his heart more than his dick.

“You can really hear that I was at the end of my rope there,” he says of “Cold Desert.” Most of the new album’s lyrics were written in a haze of alcohol and Vicodin—the latter a handy byproduct of his shoulder surgery—which may have enhanced his creativity but didn’t do much good otherwise. “I was pretty bad on pills at the end of this record and was drinking really heavily, so all my insecurities I’d just take out on the people around me. At the studio, people would have to say, ‘Go home.’ Then I’d get home and redirect it at my girlfriend. I could see everything around me crumbling.”

For Caleb, as the drinking and pills increased, there was an uncomfortable parallel he couldn’t help noticing between his own unraveling and that of his father. “Everything that went wrong in my dad’s life was due to the pressure he had on him,” he says. “I think I have pressure on me because I can’t leave my hotel room

The Followills bid farewell to 100,000 of their closest friends at Glastonbury, 2008.

“When I walked out there, I felt like
I was about to cry. My lip was quivering
like I’d just seen Mr. Holland’s Opus.”

★ ★ ★ ★ JARED FOLLOWILL AT GLASTONBURY

 

in London without someone writing about it, but he had more pressure than me. When I started to see him spiral down, I’d cover my eyes like it wasn’t happening.” He says he’s learned to deal with pressure by piling it on himself, so “when I get to the point where my dad had to give up, I’m not going to.”

Of course, doing that requires living closer to the edge than is probably healthy. “I’m not a lukewarm kind of guy,” he says. “It’s in my genes. When I was younger, I was anorexic and did that to the extreme. When I was doing drugs, I was doing it to the extreme. Anything I do, I do to the extreme.”

Only by the Night required Caleb to turn himself

 

BIG IN JAPAN

Kings of Leon aren’t the only all-American acts more popular abroad than at home

Donald Duck

Maybe it’s the speech impediment or his refusal to wear pants, but the Donald has always played second fiddle… except in Norway and Finland, where he’s more iconic and recognizable than Mickey Mouse.

Francesca Simon

The St. Louis–born
author of the
Horrid Henry
children’s series
(we’ve never
heard of it, either)
has sold 8. 8
million books
in the U.K. and
been reprinted
in 23 languages,
but can’t get a
publisher in the U.S.

Hogan’s Heroes

Since it started airing there in 1992, this ’60s sitcom about wacky Allies in the world’s most hilarious Nazi POW camp has garnered a large, devoted cult following… in Germany.

Friendster

While it’s long since been overtaken here by My Space and Facebook, the original social-networking site is still the actual-human-contact-substitute of choice in Asia. EMILY TEMPLE

inside out and confront his insecurities—about his band, his music, and himself. (“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.”) On previous albums, his voice ranged from monotone mumbles to banshee wails. On new songs such as “Use Somebody” and “Manhattan,” he belts out soaring, melodic refrains toward the last row of the proverbial stadium. “I could always sing pretty,” he says, “but I was embarrassed by my lyrics, so I’d sing like I had marbles in my mouth. This time, I went in saying, ‘If anything holds this record back, it’s not going to be my vocals.’ ”

Later that evening, at a park just outside Nashville, Nathan steps to the plate in the fourth inning of his coed, beer-league softball game. He’s wearing a white Oklahoma University baseball hat, a red Lycra T-shirt, white shorts, black socks pulled up to his knees, black Air Jordan high-top cleats, and two black batting gloves. I sit between Jared and Matt in the bleachers while The Best of Van Halen blares from the tinny speakers of a boom box nearby.

“He always buys top-of-the-line gear,” says Jared, motioning to his oldest brother. “He wants to look like he knows what he’s doing.”

On this occasion, dressing the part seems to work: He tomahawks a pitch to right center field that rolls and rolls. Nathan runs the bases—sashays, really—and with the help of some less-than-stellar fielding, crosses home plate unscathed. (I score it as a double with two errors; he insists it’s a home run.)

As he chats with Jared and Matt after the game, reminding them repeatedly that he went four for four with six RBI, nobody around the park seems to notice or care that three-fourths of the band that one month ago stood onstage in front of 100,000 rabid fans at

FROM TOP: JO MCCAUGHE Y/COURTESY BIGHASSLE; COURTESY EVERET T COLLEC TION