Kings of Leon’s Caleb Followill Is Finally Ready to Bare It All

2 min readLast year, Kings of Leon was forced to cancel part of its summer tour. The band’s lead singer, Caleb Followill, broke his foot and severely displaced his heel during a freak accident that he jokes was “a Rock ‘n’ Roll injury.” But really, he admits to Esquire, he was just playing tag with his kids—a little roughhousing that turned into eight months of recovery before he could walk back onto the stage.“I was kind of feeling sorry for myself,” Followill tells Esquire editor in chief Michael Sebastian on the latest episode of “What I’ve Learned.” The singer felt like he had let the band’s fans down. He turned 44, he lost his mother not too long ago, and he channeled all that grief and negative energy into a new, stripped-down Kings of Leon record, O My Beloved, which was released on November 6. “I had a weight on my shoulders,” he says. “And one day I picked up the guitar, and it was almost like I walked through a door and I could see things a little more clearly.”O My Beloved is the most melancholic and reflective album in Kings of Leon’s ten-album discography. Followill tells Esquire that he wanted to speak about his childhood and the family that shaped him on the new songs because he used to feel embarrassed about his past. His family grew up poor—traveling around the South and living out of their car at times. (Kings of Leon is a family band, with Caleb joined by his brothers Nathan and Jared Followill, as well as their cousin Matthew Followill.) But now, Caleb wants to pass all his memories on to his kids, and he doesn’t want them to feel ashamed about any part of the journey that led them here.“When I was writing these songs, my mind just kept going back to small moments in my life—moments that had no significance,” he says. “I wanted to tell these stories, and I wanted to be honest about parts of my life that I didn’t want to be honest about before."O My Beloved is the band’s first self-produced record since parting ways with RCA, their longtime record label. It’s also their tenth studio album, celebrating nearly twenty years since their 2008 record, Only by the Night, rocketed the band to stardom thanks to hit songs "Sex on Fire" and "Use Somebody."“I was always scared of fame, and I think I still am,” Followill says. “That’s the good thing about having your brothers next to you. They’ll rip you right back down, shine a light in your eyes and say, ‘Hey man, this can all come crumbling down and we’ll be back in our crumbling house.’”You can listen to the episode YouTube and Spotify. Elsewhere, Followill shares his secret to fifteen years of marriage (to model Lily Aldridge), and what he’s learned from touring with Pearl Jam, U2, and Zach Bryan.