By the time Kings of Leon began work on their fourth album, Only by the Night, in early 2008, the band — three Followill brothers and a cousin, all sons of a traveling Pentecostal preacher — had already spent three records establishing a scrappy Southern rock identity. Longtime collaborator Angelo Petraglia, who'd co-written material with the band since their earliest days, went digging through Caleb Followill's accumulated pile of work tapes — half-remembered fragments and abandoned ideas from earlier writing sessions — and found something worth pursuing. "I went through all these work tapes, and I heard this little bit of a song," he later recalled. Caleb confirmed it had been written the same day as another key song on the record. The band worked through the fragment together, and it became the very first track they recorded for the album.

What you're hearing

"Use Somebody" carries a bigger, more polished sound than the band's earlier, rawer records — a deliberate step toward arena-scale rock, with Caleb Followill's vocal pushed into an anthemic, gathering-storm register critics at the time compared directly to Bruce Springsteen's own "oooah-woooah" backing vocal style. The song builds steadily rather than exploding early, layering guitars and a driving rhythm section underneath a lyric about loneliness and longing for real connection — a "too-cool hipster's cry for comfort," as Entertainment Weekly put it at the time, delivered with a sincerity the band's earlier, more ironic material hadn't quite reached for.

Recorded without a clock running

The album was tracked at Blackbird Studio in Berry Hill, Tennessee, and the band's decision to work somewhere they controlled entirely — rather than renting outside studio time under a ticking financial clock — became a defining feature of the sessions. Bassist Jared Followill has described the freedom candidly: "We could relax and we didn't put a ton of pressure on ourselves." Petraglia's own account of the same arrangement carries a gentler complaint — the unlimited time meant the band would sometimes spend entire days playing basketball rather than working, prompting him, more than once, to remind them he had children waiting at home. The tension between those two accounts — genuine creative freedom versus the risk of losing momentum entirely — is part of what makes the record's actual focus, once sessions did happen, notable: a band with nowhere they had to be still managed to finish a record good enough to reshape their entire career.

How it's done

Mining a personal backlog for finished material, componentized:

KEEP A DELIBERATE ARCHIVE OF UNFINISHED IDEAS: Caleb's "work tapes" weren't a single demo waiting for attention — they were an ongoing, accumulated backlog, treated as raw material to be revisited rather than judged and discarded LET A COLLABORATOR MINE THE ARCHIVE WITH FRESH EARS: Petraglia, not Caleb himself, was the one who went digging and recognized the fragment's potential — an outside listener heard promise in material its own writer hadn't yet developed BALANCE UNSTRUCTURED TIME WITH A TRUSTED OUTSIDE PRESENCE: the band's own studio gave them freedom from financial pressure, but Petraglia's continued involvement — including his visible frustration on unproductive days — kept that freedom from becoming pure drift LET THE FIRST SONG RECORDED SET THE ALBUM'S STANDARD: choosing to track "Use Somebody" first, rather than saving it for later in the sessions, meant the record's strongest new idea anchored everything that followed it

The transferable lesson: a personal backlog of half-finished fragments is only useful if someone actually goes back through it — and an outside collaborator, unattached to why a given idea didn't work the first time, is often better positioned to spot which pieces are actually worth finishing.

The Moment

Angelo Petraglia works his way through Caleb's pile of abandoned work-tape fragments and stops on one small, unfinished idea: "I heard this little bit of a song."

What it did

"Use Somebody" became Kings of Leon's mainstream breakthrough in the United States, peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 2010 — recognition for the band, the songwriters, and engineer/producer Jacquire King alike. It transformed a group that had spent three albums as a Southern rock cult favorite into a genuine arena act, all built from a scrap of melody that had been sitting, unfinished, in one songwriter's private pile of ideas until someone else thought to go looking through it.

Sources & further listening

  1. Angelo Petraglia's and Jared Followill's accounts of the album's recording, via Billboard's 2013 cover story.
  2. Contemporary critical reception, via Entertainment Weekly and Digital Spy.
  3. Core listening: "Use Somebody," "Sex on Fire," "Closer."