At a certain point, every long-running band is expected to stop, turn around, and wave—acknowledge the milestones, play the hits, accept the congratulatory pats on the back. Caleb Followill wasn’t ready for that. Not at 20 years in, not even close.
“I wasn’t ready to wave yet,” he says. “First of all, I can’t believe it’s been 20 years. Second of all, this is not like—I’m not ready to wave. I feel like that almost made us upset at the thought of being that tribute band.”
That resistance is all over Can We Please Have Fun, a record that sounds like Kings of Leon choosing momentum. It’s looser, sharper, and—importantly—unconcerned with legacy maintenance. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s not rebirth so much as refusal: refusal to freeze-frame the past, refusal to overthink the audience, refusal to stop being curious.
Followill insists there was no dramatic geographical escape involved. “I didn’t really have to go anywhere,” he says. “I actually had to just kind of look around me and accept where I am.” That meant leaning into home life, physically and mentally. “I really embraced the idea of being home and the life that we built.”
Home became a creative bunker. “I buried myself away here in my own house, in this little office,” he says. “I started reading a lot of books, not watching television much, not getting on the internet much—just kind of closing myself off to the outside world.”
The reaction from friends was predictable. “‘Are you not scared that something’s happening in the world and you’re missing it?’” Followill laughs. “No. If the story’s big enough, it’ll find you. That’s the point. That’s what they want you to feel—so you keep watching.”
Instead of the scroll, he turned to books, especially The Artist’s Way, which sat ignored on his desk for longer than he’d like to admit. “I didn’t really even consider it,” he says. “Then one day I picked it up, started thumbing through, and pretty straight away it opened me up.”
What stuck wasn’t the theory so much as the practice. “The morning pages,” he says. “Waking up first thing, before you look at your phone, and just unloading onto a few pages of paper.” At first, it was mental clutter. “You’re just regurgitating whatever’s in you.” But then something shifted. “By the end of it, it was poetic. It just made me want to write more.”
That impulse—to write without audience math or expectation—became the engine of the record. “It’s quite therapeutic to write for yourself,” Followill says. “You start answering questions you might’ve buried away.”
That freedom also loosened his sense of tone. Can We Please Have Fun moves easily between darker subject matter and moments of lyrical mischief, sometimes within the same verse. Followill is keenly aware of how humor disarms heaviness. “Anytime there’s a lyric where I know people’s brains are going to take it one way, and then there’s that moment where they go, ‘No way that’s what he meant,’ that’s when it works.”
His only hard rule: “The first line has to be great,” he says. “If you’ve got that, the song’s good. That first line gets your head going, and then you’re just following it. Try not to take yourself too seriously. We already have so many songs that are sad or down on your luck or a little too honest.”
Musically, the band found an unlikely safety net in post-punk. “We kept having these moments where we were questioning what we were doing,” Followill says. “And then someone would say, ‘Post-punk,’ and we’d all go, ‘Yeah—post-punk.’ It made everything forgiven. It made everything feel cooler.”
Contemporary bands like IDLES and Fontaines D.C. lit a competitive spark. “There’s that hunger,” he says. “That ‘I want to be better than you’ mentality. I’m competitive. When I hear that stuff, I’m like, ‘Alright boys, let’s go.’”
The timing wasn’t lost on him. So many veteran rock bands like Pearl Jam and Blink 182 are suddenly active again, releasing new music instead of museum pieces. “It’s like the world got to a place where it was like, ‘Alright, call the rock bands—we need music,’” he jokes. “Like the Avengers.”
That sense of relevance—earned, not inherited—is what Followill clung to when the anniversary chatter crept in. “It was the easy thing to do,” he says of the retrospective route. “Go out there, wave, play the hits. But I wasn’t ready.”
Instead, Can We Please Have Fun became a line in the sand. “This record pushed me into the next phase,” he says. “I’m proud of everything we’ve done, but I’m looking forward. There are already songs I can’t wait to write because of this album. I feel as inspired as I was at the very beginning,” he says. “And I haven’t felt that inspired in the last ten years.”
No waving. Just a band still hungry enough to kick the door instead.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
