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“I’ve been keeping the secret of my upbringing,” Brandon Flowers laughs. We all know the story: 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 had shown 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, 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. Those ideas culminated in his 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, he showed his own children the scenes that made him who he was as a young man. Much of the music Flowers worked on over the next five years began as a direct continuation, forging deeper into foundational sounds and memories. He recognized that 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 often mingled with The Killers’ alternative traditions, but Flowers found he’d tapped a new vein of 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.” 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 friends and family from his teenage years until now, 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.”
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 new songs but was awed by the musicians gathered for the sessions: Nashville pros ranging in age from their thirties to eighties, who 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 band included longtime Gillian Welch collaborator David Rawlings, pedal steel player Bruce Bouton, and 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy. The group played through each track three or four times live in the room; one take often became the take. “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.
Thrasher kicks off with “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind,” buoyed by a loping rhythm and pedal steel, with Flowers singing of the happenstance beauty in how the cosmos places us next to the people we spend our lives with. Though many songs emerge from love, several catalogue darker events: “One Of Us” picks up the swing of “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind” but acts as a tribute to a brother-in-law who suddenly passed several years ago, while “Miss America” slows things down and travels 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 of “Plans.” “Paradise” pulls from Flowers’ extended family working and aging in the casino ecosystem of Vegas, with mariachi horns and sunburnt guitar evoking the “Red Ground” name-checked in its title. “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 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 and acts as a grand finale to an album of aged family photographs and snapshots from across the decades.
In the end, Thrasher is a 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.”