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13:34 · 2,260 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The band are three Followill brothers and a cousin, raised as preachers' kids moving between churches in the southern US, who regrouped in Nashville after their parents divorced.
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- Their origin method was crude and effective: once RCA noticed them they locked themselves in a basement for a month with an ounce of weed to see what came out, and the resulting EP became the basis of the first album.
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- In the garage rock revival they were the outlier, playing loose seventies southern rock as the southern counterpart to The Strokes' New York sound, and they broke in Britain well before America.
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- Opening for U2 on the 2005 Vertigo tour is identified as the hinge. Watching arena sound night after night changed how they wrote, and the next record sounded like a different band.
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- Caleb Followill's explanation is blunt: when you come up with ideas inside an arena they naturally sound bigger. The mustaches and retro haircuts went at the same time as the small-room sound.
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- Caleb has a habit of cutting songs the band call hits, out of a fear of oversaturating the market, which nearly kept Sex on Fire off the record entirely.
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- Sex on Fire went to number one in the UK and only 56 on the Hot 100, and Caleb found it absurd that after writing about life, death and religion his first big hit was about sex being on fire.
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- Use Somebody was the real breakthrough, peaking at four and spending 57 weeks on the Hot 100, which is the point the sellout charge arrives.
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- At Reading in 2009 the crowd reaction fell short of what they expected, Caleb said so from the stage, and the band finished the set, apparently destroyed instruments and vented on Twitter afterwards.
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- The breaking point came in Dallas in 2011, when Caleb walked off mid-show and never returned. The rest of the tour was cancelled, blamed on vocal problems and exhaustion after regular steroid injections in his throat, and the year-long hiatus that followed is what kept the band together.
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