And the Welcome everybody and thanks for joining us for another edition of Soderjaker on songwriting.

I'm Simon, here as always with Brian, and with us for episode 266 are the frontman and bassist

for one of America's biggest rock bands.

Since their formation in the early 2000s, they've transmuted from Hirschhoot Garage Rockers

into multiple Grammy-winning arena-filling superstars, and to date have shifted 20 million albums

and almost 40 million singles worldwide.

As this episode reaches you, the four piece have just dropped their ninth studio effort,

Can We Please Have Fun, produced by Kid Harpoon and laid down a Dark Horse recording studio in Franklin Tennessee.

We are thrilled to welcome Kings of Leon's Caleb and Jared Followle to the show.

Now we were supposed to interview Caleb and Jared in person in London back in early April,

but thanks to the frankly deplorable state of the UK's transport infrastructure,

our trains were cancelled and we couldn't make it to the capital.

Yeah, that was frustrating to say the least, but all was not lost.

We were still able to set up a zoom with the guys the very same afternoon.

In case you didn't know, Caleb, Jared and the band's drummer Nathan follow-il are siblings and theirs was a pretty unconventional

childhood.

Their father Ivan was a Pentecostal preacher and they spent much of their youth touring the

deep south with their parents in the back of their dad's 1988 Purple Oldsmobile,

during which time they were mostly homeschooled by their mother Betty Ann.

Growing up in the South, they heard quite a bit of soul, R and B and gospel,

but weren't exposed to much rock and roll, aside from the Neil Young and

Rolling Stones cassette, their dad would play in the car when their mom had fallen asleep.

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