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“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, post-punk, and Brit pop his brother showed him, yet spending just as much time driving the countryside with his dad and hearing Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings reflect his surroundings back at him. Those disparate influences have converged in Flowers’ music for twenty years, though 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 he worked on in the ensuing five years began as a direct continuation, forging deeper into foundational sounds and memories. He recognized the “big and shiny fantasy” of Las Vegas wasn’t the right home for this writing, and he embarked on his first solo endeavor in over a decade.
Americana and Western stylings have long mingled with The Killers’ alternative traditions, but Flowers found a new vein of songwriting in his father’s music — “Country-Western” — and discovered that the stories he carries “really feel most at home in the skin of this beautiful American tradition.”
He wrote honky-tonk ragers, highway rambles, and winsome ballads, all lived-in and organic. Much of Thrasher features songs written in persona that thinly veil stories about friends and family from his teenage years until now, from Vegas to Nephi and back again, 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.”
Flowers decamped to Nashville to work with producers Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado, continuing collaborations begun with 2020’s Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine. He arrived confident in the songs but found himself awed by the musicians gathered for the sessions. The band were Nashville pros, ranging in age from their thirties to eighties, and had 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 group included longtime Gillian Welch collaborator David Rawlings on guitar, pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, and 85-year-old Charlie McCoy, the harmonica player who appeared on Bob Dylan’s Nashville records.
They played through each track three or four times live in the room; one take often stood as the take. Flowers hadn’t recorded that way since Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town, and he 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 burst of writing.
Thrasher opens with “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind,” buoyed by a loping rhythm and pedal steel, singing of the happenstance beauty in how the cosmos places us next to the people with whom we spend our lives. Though many songs emerge from love, several catalogue darker events: “One Of Us” echoes the swing of the opener but acts as a tribute to a brother-in-law who suddenly passed several years ago, while “Miss America” slows things down to travel from ’80s shopping-mall pageants to fraught early childhood memories. There are classic American parables of lofty dreams that don’t quite take in the intimate cinema of the dusty orchestration in “Plans.” “Paradise” pulls from Flowers’ extended family working and aging in the casino ecosystem of Vegas. Mariachi horns and sunburnt guitar evoke the “Red Ground” name-checked in its title, while “Tiger’s Blood” returns to the Nephi glimpsed on Pressure Machine, blending Thrasher’s rough-hewn aesthetic with Flowers’ 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 about eternity, meets Elvis in a Tesla, and asks him if it was all worth it. Psychedelic in nature, the song is littered with references to Flowers’ life and serves as a grand finale to an album of aged family photographs and snapshots across the decades.
In the end, Thrasher is a heartfelt and adventurous document of the people Flowers has known, loved, and feared, and 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.”