(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Mon 23 March 2026 22:00, UK
When brothers Nathan and Caleb Followill relocated to just outside of Nashville, Tennessee, in 1997, their love of country music merged with a newfound appreciation of classic rock, ranging from The Rolling Stones to The Clash – their brother, Jared, favoured the Pixies and The Velvet Underground.
These influences came together to form the basis of their mutual sound and, when their cousin, Matthew, joined them in Nashville in 1999, Kings of Leon was solidified.
As the initial brainchild of Nathan and Caleb, the band had signed to RCA Records in 2002, but the pair insisted that, rather than performing as a duo, as the label wanted, Kings of Leon would be a family affair. “We don’t want to be Evan and Jaron,” Nathan recalled telling the label, referencing the identical twin brothers-musicians duo.
He continued to Billboard in 2009, “We’re going to buy our little brother a bass, he’s a freshman in high school. Caleb will teach himself the guitar, Matthew played guitar when he was ten, and I’ll play the drums.”
As Caleb recalls, they essentially “kidnapped” Matthew from his hometown of Mississippi in order to recruit him for the band, telling Matthew’s mother that he would be staying with them for a week, only to not allow him to return home. To begin writing music, the four locked themselves in their basement, sustained by an ounce of marijuana and the food that the brothers’ mom brought down to them. Emerging a month later, Kings of Leon had completed their debut EP, 2003’s Holy Roller Novocaine.
That same year, after garnering more attention in the UK and Ireland with their debut album, Youth and Young Manhood, than they did Stateside, it would take about five years until Kings of Leon would chart in America, thanks to the success of their fourth album, 2008’s Only by the Night – and particularly, its lead single, ‘Sex on Fire’.
The sensation of ‘Sex on Fire’, whether driven by the infamy of its title or by the band’s pop sheen veiled over their signature Southern rock sound, cannot be overstated: in the UK, the song shot up to number one on the charts, became Britain’s second most-downloaded single (behind Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’) and sold 1.2million copies by 2012, but, like many happy accidents in music, ‘Sex on Fire’ came from a mistaken comment that effectively changed the trajectory of the song.
“They were totally different lyrics,” Nathan Followill revealed, while speaking on the Australian radio station Triple J in 2009. “Depending on whether a song starts with a melody or starts with lyrics, you know if it starts with a melody, you just keep playing the melody over and over until you get it down, and just throw in any lyrics that fit the verbal flow.”
Nathan continued to explain that the initial song title was ‘Set Us On Fire’. “One of the sound mixers in the studio walked in as we were playing and said, ‘Sex on fire, huh?’ And it just kind of became a running joke, and we stuck with it,” he said.
In conversation with Mojo in 2009, Caleb Followill explained, “We’d been messing around with the melody and the first time I said, ‘This sex is on fire,’ I didn’t really know what I was saying. I just kinda laughed it off. But everyone around me convinced me that it was a hook. I didn’t disagree with them. It was a hook, although I knew it didn’t really make sense.”
“It’s a strange thing,” he continued, concluding, “I don’t know how that song did what it did, but it’s definitely one of those songs that I’m never gonna be ashamed of. Hell, it opened a lot of doors for us!”
