Kings of Leon Found the Fun in Its Fort Worth Debut

Kings of Leon songs don’t immediately scan as joyous. Tightly coiled, brooding, maybe even slightly peculiar, sure, but not joyous.

“Single book of matches, gonna burn what’s standing in the way/Roaring down the mountain, now they’re calling on the fire brigade,” goes the opening lines of “Pyro,” from the band’s 2010 LP Come Around Sundown (an album dearly deserving of a reassessment, but we digress).

But those same ominous lyrics, transposed from a turntable to a near-capacity arena, take on an entirely different energy live, eliciting a knowing roar of appreciation, turning an oblique song about emotional annihilation into a gleeful singalong, phones hoisted high and voices mingling with the sound of a band confident in its ability to walk that tightrope between bleak and beautiful.

Saturday night marked Kings of Leon’s Fort Worth debut, as the Grammy-winning rock group brought its “Can We Please Have Fun” world tour to Dickies Arena (with opener Phamtogram)  for two hours and more than two dozen songs, just the third stop on its U.S. leg, which will stretch deep into 2024. It was the band’s first North Texas gig in nearly three years.
Having spent the summer touring Europe, the core foursome — brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and cousin Matthew Followill — and touring members Liam O’Neil and Timothy Deaux were razor-sharp from the opening notes of “Ballerina Radio,” one of eight total tracks from their recently released ninth studio album, Can We Please Have Fun, performed Saturday.

Some of that readiness is, admittedly, muscle memory. Somehow, 20 years have slipped past since Kings of Leon first emerged from the mists of grunge and early aughts New York blog rock. In that relative pop music eternity, the band has, in the margins, dabbled in pulling its classic rock style in new directions, but it always found a way to retain its identity.
Put another way: Whether scuffed up or shined down, Kings of Leon has remained true to itself from 2003’s debut Youth & Young Manhood onward. That coherence is part of the reason why Dickies Arena teemed with actual fans of the band, those who would scream an ecstatic “Yes!” and sing along at top volume to lesser-known cuts like “Waste a Moment,” “Manhattan” or “Beautiful War” with as much gusto as the iron-clad hits like “Sex on Fire” or “Use Somebody.”

So, when Caleb Followill stepped to the microphone early on and said, without a trace of irony, “It’s so good to be here with you — thank you for coming out and supporting us,” the sentiment felt genuine, rather than an obligatory bit of between-song patter. That bond between performer and audience has endured because it is taken seriously on both sides of the stage.

Another element contributing to longevity is Kings of Leon’s willingness to play around with its presentation. Caleb Followill began the night walking out on stage and placing a cassette (emblazoned with a handmade Can We Please Have Fun label) into a playback machine. It was a retro bit of business, underscoring the new-old feel of the current record’s songs — Fun was produced by Kid Harpoon, who has collaborated with the likes of Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine and Miley Cyrus (to name just three whose catalogs are quite far afield from Kings of Leon’s).

The band reinforced this right now/back then sensibility elsewhere on Saturday, deploying heavily treated video (during the short, strange track “Razz,” Caleb Followill was surrounded by crew members shoving video cameras at him, which resulted in grungy, chaotic images on the screens beside and behind the band) and graphics exuding a certain “Midnight Special” aura.

Still, none of the window dressing would have mattered if the songs and the men playing them weren’t locked in. The evening flagged briefly only toward the end — for whatever reason, “Split Screen” seemed to sap some of the energy, but “The Bandit” brought it right back — and for most of the night, the songs spilled into one another, gorgeously scaffolded creations such as “The Bucket,” “Revelry” and “Molly’s Chambers” tumbling out into the room.

Kings of Leon has also introduced, as seems to be the fashion among A-list acts at present, a slot in the setlist for a nightly surprise (they’re calling it “Song for the City”). Thus far, the sextet has been reaching deep into its catalog and dusting off live rarities — Fort Worth was treated to “Tonight,” from 2013’s Mechanical Bull, which the band hadn’t played in concert in a decade.

“At this point in the evening, we’re scared shitless,” Caleb Followill said, introducing the tune. “We rehearsed it today, and I messed it up. ... If I do that again, just clap.” (From all appearances, the song was rendered with nary a misstep.)

That terror, though, might just be another way to wake up the nerve endings, and tap into a sense of exhilaration. Can We Please Have Fun is a fair question of a band to ask itself, two decades on, particularly when its biggest hits evoke uplift until one looks more closely. (Not for nothing, but “Use Somebody” overflows with anguish from its first line: “I’ve been roamin’ around, always lookin’ down at all I see.”)

If the smiles and singing and dancing in the aisles visible inside Dickies Arena Saturday night is any indication, that feeling — call it fun; call it joy — has been hiding in plain sight all along.