Brandon Flowers (Night 2)

“I’ve been keeping the secret of my upbringing,” Brandon Flowers laughs. We all know the story: a Mormon raised among the glimmer of casinos, drawn to new wave, post-punk and Brit pop, but also shaped by driving the countryside with his dad and hearing Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Those 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 on his formative years in Utah, and those ideas culminated in his third solo album, Thrasher — the most personal collection of songs he’s ever written.\n\nAfter moving back to Utah, Flowers began to pull the curtain back on The Killers’ recent album Pressure Machine (2021). Though often associated with Las Vegas, much of Flowers’ youth actually occurred in Nephi, a small Utah town two hours south of Salt Lake City. Back home again, he showed his children the scenes that made him who he was. Much of the music he worked on over the next five years began as a continuation of that reflection, digging into foundational sounds and memories. He realized the “big and shiny fantasy” of Las Vegas wasn’t the right home for this writing and embarked on his first solo endeavor in over a decade.\n\nFlowers found his way back to his father’s music — “Country-Western” — and discovered the stories he carries felt most at home in that American tradition. He wrote honky-tonk ragers, highway rambles, and winsome ballads, many written in persona and thinly veiling stories about friends and family from his teenage years to the present, from Vegas to Nephi and back again. “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.”\n\nHe decamped to Nashville to work with producers Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado, continuing collaborations begun on Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine. Flowers says he was awed by the musicians gathered for the sessions: local pros ranging in age from their thirties to eighties, with credits from Elvis records to ’70s outlaw country to ’90s country crossover hits. The band included David Rawlings, pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, and harmonica player Charlie McCoy. They played through each track three or four times live in the room; one take would be the one. “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 went to Thrasher; half to a still-mysterious sister album.\n\nThrasher opens with “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind,” a loping, pedal-steel-tinged song about the happenstance of how we end up next to the people we spend our lives with. Many songs emerge from love but also catalogue darker events: “One Of Us” acts as a tribute to a brother-in-law who passed suddenly, while “Miss America” moves from ’80s shopping-mall pageants to fraught early childhood memories. There are American parables of loftier dreams that didn’t quite take, heard in the dusty orchestration of “Plans.” “Paradise” looks to 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, and “Tiger’s Blood” returns to the Nephi glimpsed on Pressure Machine, blending Thrasher’s rough-hewn aesthetic with Flowers’ arena-rock scope.\n\nIn its final moments Thrasher culminates in the phantasmagoric “An American Dream,” where Flowers remembers his mom, watches his dad near the end of his life, passes billboards about eternity, meets Elvis in a Tesla, and asks if it was all worth it. Though psychedelic in nature, the song is full of references to Flowers’ life, a grand finale to an album of aged family photographs and snapshots across the decades. In the end, Thrasher is a document of the people Flowers has known and loved and feared, and a portrait of a man making peace with himself and the places, sights, and sounds that made him.\n\n"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."