Brandon Flowers

“I’ve been keeping the secret of my upbringing,” Brandon Flowers laughs. We all know the story,
fittingly mythological: a Mormon raised in the seedy glimmer of casinos, destined for rock ‘n’ roll
stardom. But before that, Flowers was a teenager in small-town Utah, taken with the new wave and
post-punk and Britpop his brother had shown him, yet spending just as much time driving the
countryside with his dad and hearing Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings songs reflect his
surroundings back at him. Those seemingly disparate influences have converged in Flowers’ music
for twenty years, but he only rarely wrote about that chapter of his life. As he entered his forties, he
began reflecting not only on the whirlwind of his adulthood as a rockstar, but also on his formative
years in Utah. Ideas swirled, then arrived in the form of the music that first taught him about
storytelling. They culminated in Flowers’ third solo album Thrasher, the most personal collection of
songs he’s ever written.
After moving back to Utah, Flowers began to pull the curtain back on The Killers’ most recent
album, 2021’s Pressure Machine. Though most often associated with Las Vegas, most of Flowers’
youth actually occurred in Nephi, the small Utah town some two hours south of Salt Lake City. Now
back home again, he showed his own children the scenes that made him who he was as a young man.
Much of the music Flowers has worked on in the ensuing five years began as a direct continuation,
forging deeper into foundational sounds and foundational memories. He began to recognize the “big
and shiny fantasy” of Las Vegas that so often courses through The Killers’ music wasn’t the right
home for this writing, and he embarked on his first solo endeavor in over a decade. Though
Americana and Western stylings have often mingled with the alternative traditions in The Killers’
DNA as far back as their 2006 sophomore outing Sam’s Town all the way on to Pressure Machine,
Flowers found that he’d tapped a new, rich vein of his songwriting: “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found
my way back to my father’s music — ‘Country-Western’ — and discovered that the stories I carry
really feel most at home in the skin of this beautiful American tradition.”
It was only an idiosyncratically and eternally American form that allowed Flowers to find the grain
and gravity he needed. He wrote honky-tonk ragers, highway rambles, and winsome ballads, all
lived-in and organic. Much of Thrasher features songs written in persona thinly veiling stories about
Flowers’ friends and family from his teenage years until now, from Vegas to Nephi and back again,
all rendered with the balance of sadness and humor inherent to country music. “I used to think my
experiences weren’t interesting enough,” he says. “It took a lot of living for me to recognize that my
story was never just my own. Other people have felt these things. Turning them into songs just helps
me make sense of it.”
Eventually, Flowers decamped to Nashville to work with producers Shawn Everett and Jonathan
Rado, picking up a collaboration begun with 2020’s Imploding The Mirage and Pressure Machine.
Flowers rolled into town confident of the potency in these new songs, but nevertheless found himself
awed by the musicians gathered for the sessions. The band were all Nashville pros, ranging in age
from their thirties to eighties, having played on everything from Elvis records to ‘70s outlaw country
albums to ‘90s country crossover hits. “Every day we’d start late because people would sit and tell
stories,” he recalls. The band featured local legends like longtime Gillian Welch collaborator David
Rawlings on guitar, the prolific and influential pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, and 85-year-old
Charlie McCoy, a journeyman harmonica player who appeared on all four of Bob Dylan’s iconic
Nashville records.
The group played through each track three or four times live in the room. One of them ended up
being the take. That was it. Flowers hadn’t recorded that way since Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town, and
soon found himself swept up by the energy. “It was one of the highlights of my recording career.
There was so much experience and competence in the room. I didn’t want it to end. We cut 23 songs
in three weeks,” he says. Half of those songs were destined for Thrasher, and half for a
still-mysterious sister album that emerged from the same fruitful burst of writing but covered
different thematic territory.
It all kicks off with “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind.” Buoyed by a loping rhythm and pedal steel,
Flowers sings of the happenstance beauty in how the cosmos places us next to the people with whom
we spend the rest of our lives. Though each song emerges from love in some form, many catalogue
darker events: “One Of Us” picks up the swing of “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind” but acts as
tribute to a brother-in-law who suddenly passed several years ago, while “Miss America” slows it
down to travel from ‘80s shopping mall pageants to fraught early childhood memories. There are
classic American parables, of lofty dreams that didn’t quite take in the intimate cinema of the dusty
orchestration in “Plans.” Simultaneously poignant and tongue-in-cheek, “Paradise” pulls from
Flowers’ extended family working and aging in the casino ecosystem of Vegas. Mariachi horns and
sunburnt guitar evocatively conjure the “Red Ground” namechecked in its title, while “Tiger’s
Blood” returns to the Nephi glimpsed on Pressure Machine with a seamless blend of Thrasher’s
rough-hewn aesthetic and Flowers’ customary arena-rock scope.
In its final moments, Thrasher throws it all together in the phantasmagoric “An American Dream”:
Flowers remembers his mom while watching his dad near the end of his life, passes billboards talking
about eternity, meets Elvis in a Tesla, and asks him if it was all worth it. Though psychedelic in
nature, the song is littered with references to Flowers’ life, a grand finale to an album of aged family
photographs and snapshots from across the decades. In the end, Thrasher is a heartfelt and
adventurous document of all the people Flowers has known and loved and feared, but also a portrait
of a man making peace with himself and the places, sights, and sounds that made him.
“I don’t know when is the appropriate time to figure out who you are, but it’s starting to come
together for me now,” Flowers concludes. “I’m always lurking somewhere in the shadows of the
stories I tell. But on Thrasher I’m in the kitchen, I’m on the phone, and I’m waking the neighbors.”