Just as he’s gearing up to promote his third solo album, Thrasher, due out Aug. 21, Killers singer Brandon Flowers is wondering if he’s getting too old for this stuff. In a new interview with The Times, Flowers, 45, takes stock of his 20-plus-year career to date and wonders if the fame, attention and riches are all worth it.
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“My dad goes to yard sales, where he buys frames to take home and paint. He’s never had any money in his life and he’s happier than I am,” Flowers told the U.K. paper, wondering if somehow getting everything you ever wanted really isn’t the answer to life’s big questions.
“I’m really going through it right now: how much longer do I want to do this, what does it mean, why am I doing it anyway?,” he added, putting a bit of a fright into the band’s millions of fans, who likely are not yet ready for the ride to be over yet. “Whenever I finish a tour, without fail I get sick. Then I think of Mick Jagger and ask myself: what keeps him getting up on that stage? I guess it’s because there are powerful moments in a concert. How could I not want to do that?”
The 10-track album — Flowers’ first solo effort in more than a decade — was recorded in Nashville with producers Shawn Everett and Johnathan Rado and definitely leans into a honky-tonkin’, country-western vibe, according to the singer. He described the overall mood as being more like his “father’s music. There would be country and western slow dances at school and at the golf course in Nephi [Utah, where Flowers spent his teenage years], which was full of people who had left the Mormon church and now drank a lot,” he said. “It was outlaw country. Then I’m reading Steinbeck, which leads me to Cormac McCarthy and western culture in general. Now, the older I get, the more I have gravitated towards being … I guess … my dad.”
Flowers is a devout, and proud Mormon (he prefers that term to the more common modern parlance: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and the youngest of six who said he grew up an “outlier” in Utah. He pays tribute to some of his extended family on Thrasher, including on the song “Miss America,” which refers to a meeting at the car wash where Kevin Bacon filmed a scene for Footloose where he chatted with one of his four older sisters, who at the time was stuck in a violent marriage.
He describes the awkward kid he was in “Tiger’s Blood,” singing about “peach-fuzz boys getting hard in the corner of Mortal Combat” and being “New kid in the county/ Crowd-shy, hunched in the shoulders/ With gelled-up hair.” Calling the collection “life songs, not love songs,” Flowers also touched on “One of Us,” a track about his brother-in-law, a Mormon missionary who repeatedly came to the Flowers home to try and convert the singer’s dad, which he failed at, while wooing one of the singer’s sisters. “That’s kind of frowned upon in the church,” he said.
While he seems to be half-contemplating retirement, Flowers also looks back at what could have been on his follow-up to 2015’sThe Desired Effect, recalling that he “aspired” to be a valet parker in Las Vegas like his cousins and uncles, whose tips helped support their families. Instead, his first job was as a busboy at Spago in Caesars Palace, followed by gigs at a French brasserie and a golf course. The Thrasher song “Paradise” chronicles the story of his cousin Bobby, who is still working as a valet for Vegas resorts 30 years later.
Despite the rigors of the road, Flowers is gearing up to support Thrasher with a fall tour slated to kick off on Sept. 1 in Phoenix, Ariz. at the Van Buren. The North American run is currently slated to wind down on Oct. 6 at the Encore Theater at Wynn in Las Vegas. The Killers will join Olivia Dean and Jack White at the inaugural Ocean Way Festival on Sept. 26-27, the first major music festival on Santa Monica Beach.
