John Lucas

I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here are a couple of them.

The Killers Are Staying Alive: Singer Brandon Flowers and company just might be the world’s last big mainstream rock ’n’ roll band (2012)

(This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

As far as problems go, it’s a nice one to have, but the Killers do have a dilemma on their hands. The Las Vegas–based quartet is so stoked about its new album, Battle Born, that it’s having difficulty figuring out which songs not to play on its current tour. Frontman Brandon Flowers tells the Straight that he and his bandmates—guitarist Dave Keuning, bassist Mark Stoermer, and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr.—have had to resist the temptation to play Battle Born in its entirety.

“You know the songs—you wrote the songs—but when you’re rehearsing and you’re getting ready for the tour you kind of have to relearn everything,” Flowers says, reached in Birmingham, England, on All Saints’ Day. “We’ve never, as a band, I don’t think, had so much fun playing an album. And so we were like, ‘Let’s just play this thing.’ It’s proven to be difficult. People are there to hear songs that they’ve already grown attached to from the past, and we don’t want to withhold those from people, so we’ve just got to try to find a nice balance. And we’re still working that out. We’ve been playing 10 or 11 new songs a night, and I think we’re gonna knock it down to nine tonight; maybe eight or seven later on.”

At this point in their career, with three previous LPs under their collective belt, the Killers have no shortage of material from which to put together a suitably deadly set list. Long-time fans needn’t worry that Flowers and company will give short shrift to monster singles like “Somebody Told Me”, “Human”, and “When We Were Young”.

“We don’t mind doing that,” Flowers says of running through the obligatory hits. “It always baffles me when bands withhold those songs. But we’re proud of them. We’re thankful that people are there. Give ’em what they want.”

One of the things they want without fail, night after night, city after city, is to sing along to “Mr. Brightside”. Released in 2004, the dance-punk-tinged fist-pumper was the Killers’ recorded debut, and it remains one of the group’s most popular songs. Flowers can’t count the number of times he’s had to sing it, but he’s not complaining.

“We’ve never not played that one, so it’s been played a couple thousand times,” he says. “I don’t get tired of it, though. That one’s taken on such a life of its own now that I don’t even know that I’m needed. As soon as Dave starts that guitar line, it’s on its way. People are just going. It’s fun every night.”

Battle Born might not contain quite as many moments of cathartic, workday-obliterating indie-rock swagger as the Killers’ first album, 2004’s Hot Fuss, but those don’t seem to be the band’s raison d’être anymore. The new record is the work of a maturing act, whose youthful fire, while not quite quenched, is now tempered by the uncertainty and ambivalence that go along with growing up. The leadoff single, “Runaways”, is a rousing, Springsteen-esque anthem aimed at the cheap seats. Flowers sings from the perspective of a husband and father who desperately seeks contentment in domesticity but can’t silence the voice in his head that keeps telling him it’s all just a gilded cage: “At night I come home after they go to sleep/Like a stumbling ghost, I haunt these halls/There’s a picture of us on our wedding day/I recognize the girl but I can’t settle in these walls.”

“Runaways” is a devastating snapshot of a marriage held together by an ever-fraying thread, but Flowers says it seems as though many listeners don’t pick up on that. “People just say, ‘Oh, this is the guy who wrote “Somebody Told Me”, so this is just a sappy love song.’ The first line is ‘Blonde hair blowin’ in the summer wind,’ and they just zone out after that. Like I’m not allowed to grow up and express myself. But I did, and it’s happening whether people like it or not.

“We knew that it was a little bit of dangerous territory to come out and have that be the face of the record,” the singer continues, “and it’s not your quintessential song that you hear on the radio. Even structurally it’s not. But we’re really proud of it, and I’m thankful for it every night, now that we’re playing it. It’s got a weight to it, but it’s also breezy at the same time.”

With its soaring melodies, “Runaways” showcases Flowers’s growing vocal prowess. From the way the 31-year-old powers through the choruses, it’s evident that the voice lessons he took before hitting the studio to record Battle Born were a worthwhile investment. It’s not just the frontman’s lead singing that stands out, however. The gorgeously layered backing vocals on “Flesh and Bone” and the title track might bring Queen to mind, but Flowers reveals that he drew inspiration from a more unlikely source: Eric Carmen. Not the tunesmith’s MOR ballads (“All By Myself”, “Make Me Lose Control”), mind you, but one particular song by his early ’70s power-pop outfit the Raspberries.

“Those vocals came sort of by accident,” Flowers notes. “We were finishing the record and we got a call from Tim Burton to do a cover for the end of Dark Shadows. The movie was done, and they were really needing some help. I don’t know why they didn’t just use the original. So we had to learn this song by the Raspberries called ‘Go All the Way’—I had never heard it before—and record it. We had about two days to do it. There are these amazing vocal arrangements in that song, and it’s an awesome song. The same guy [Carmen] wrote ‘Hungry Eyes’ in the ’80s, and he had a couple of huge ballads. If you listen to that song I guess you’ll see what I’m saying. It’s just got these amazing vocal arrangements. I was just finishing up that ‘Battle Born’ song and I tested out some of the new stuff I learned, I guess. And it worked out, so it’s a real highlight for the record. We’re worried, because it’s the last song on the record and, you know, people don’t buy albums anymore. So we’re hoping that, because it’s at least the title track, people will listen to that one.”

In spite of Flowers’s misgivings, Battle Born has indeed been selling. It did well enough when it was released in September to debut at number three on the Billboard album chart. It likewise debuted at number three in Canada, and at number one in the U.K. and Ireland. But the frontman makes a valid point. The Killers have been around for just over a decade, which is long enough to witness a fundamental change in the music business. When Hot Fuss came out, CD sales had yet to decline into the monumental slump of the past few years. For better or worse, up-and-coming new acts are having to find different ways of getting their sounds out to the world, and not many of them are getting rich doing so.

Could the Killers, then, be the last big mainstream band?

“I don’t know,” admits Flowers. “I hope not. There haven’t been many since we’ve come out that have done it. Well, Mumford & Sons seem like they’re on their way to doing it. They’re pretty much the only ones post-2004. It’s bound to happen, though. Somebody’s going to have talent, and love rock and melody, and write a good song. It’s going to happen. But it’s gonna be harder for them than it was for us. And it was harder for us than it was for bands in the ’90s or the ’80s.”

True enough. The Killers spent their share of time in the indie trenches; they initially signed to British label Lizard King Records, whose current roster includes no one you’ve ever heard of. They’ve also weathered the shifting tides of the industry while never finding much favour with snobbish critics. Reviewing the band’s 2008 LP Day & Age, Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal suggested that Flowers was “a weirdo trying to please himself and his audience at the same time but constantly coming up a little short on at least half of that equation”. Flowers, a Mormon, has even had his rock ’n’ roll credentials called into question thanks to his abstinence from booze and drugs. And yet these four men constitute one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.

Battle born, indeed.

In + Out: Brandon Flowers sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know

On facing atheist Richard Dawkins on Swedish TV: “I had seen Dawkins’s spiel on Mormons before. He kind of says verbatim what he’s already said in other interviews when asked about Mormonism. So I do genuinely look shocked when he’s doing it, but it was so strange to be five feet from him while he was doing it.”

On arguing with Dawkins: “I’m not going to be the guy that’s going to change his mind, and he’s not going to change mine. It’s the debate that’s never going to end. Science is never going to turn over a rock and discover that there is no God. It’s never going to happen. You’re never going to disprove Him. There’s always going to be people that believe in Him, so I don’t see why they can’t go hand in hand.”

On whether the Killers will release a Christmas song in 2012: “Yes. We have never pushed it to the limit this far before, though. We’re really running late. We’re running behind, but we are going to have one. We have a song. The lyrics are almost finished, and we’re gonna make a video. It’s going to be number seven. I can’t believe it’s been seven years we’ve been doing these. We love them. We love doing it.”

the Killers soldier on to get hyper-personal and deep on Wonderful Wonderful (2018)

(This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

On the surface, there wouldn’t appear to be that much common ground between Brandon Flowers and Alice Cooper. In his ’70s heyday, shock-rock progenitor Cooper embodied all that was depraved and evil about rock ’n’ roll, singing tender paeans to necrophilia and decapitating baby dolls on-stage.

Flowers, on the other hand, has a sort of clean-cut nice-guy image seemingly at odds with his status as the frontman of one of this millennium’s biggest rock bands. Heck, in 2011 the guy made a video at the behest of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints with the title “I’m Brandon Flowers and I’m a Mormon”.

When the Straight connects with Flowers via telephone, the 37-year-old musician is at home in Park City, Utah, enjoying some much-needed downtime in a summer that has been packed with tour dates. He reveals that he and the man born Vincent Furnier actually aren’t as different as they may seem—and not just because Flowers fronts a group called the Killers and Cooper’s fourth LP with his own band was titled Killer.

“We share a lot in common, actually,” says Flowers. “We were both raised in the desert, we both enjoy golf, we’ve both worn eyeliner—he’s worn more than me.”

Cooper famously spends as many as six days a week on the links at the Arizona Biltmore Golf Club in his hometown of Phoenix. Flowers is less active in that department—thanks in large part to an ongoing issue with his shoulders—but there was a time in his youth when he looked set to follow in the footsteps of his cousin, pro golfer Craig Barlow.

Then, as rock ’n’ roll legend would have it, Flowers’s career path was changed forever when someone stole his golf clubs and he turned to music instead.

That’s turned out pretty well for him. Since forming in Las Vegas in 2001, the Killers have released five well-received studio albums and have toured the world numerous times. The band first broke big in the U.K. and has arguably had its greatest success there, with all of its LPs hitting the top spot on the Official Albums Chart. The most recent one, Wonderful Wonderful, was the first to match that stateside by reaching No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Flowers has said that the lyrics on Wonderful Wonderful are among the most personal he has ever written, with songs such as “Rut” and “Some Kind of Love” delving into the childhood trauma and ongoing struggle with PTSD faced by his wife, Tana. Elsewhere, Flowers uses the recurring motif of boxing (most notably on “Tyson vs Douglas” but also on “Run for Cover”, which namechecks legendary heavyweight champ Sonny Liston) to explore themes including endurance and disillusionment.

Wonderful Wonderful came out almost a year ago, but Flowers says he has no difficulty tapping into the emotions that shaped some of its most affecting songs, even after performing them on-stage night after night on tour. To keep things from getting too heavy, he says, the band has really been leaning into its more crowd-pleasing fare, in particular “The Man”. A strutting slab of bombast that neatly straddles glam rock and electro-fried disco, “The Man” is Flowers’s winking look back at the cocksure days of his youth.

“It’s inhabiting this person I was, or this concept of what I thought a man should be when I was 15, when I was ignorant,” he notes. “I’m still learning, and I’m still becoming that man that I want to be.

“It brought a lot of levity to the record and a whole new element to the live show,” the singer continues. “We usually pair it with the song ‘Somebody Told Me’, and the spirit of it sort of overflows into that song as well, and it’s a nice moment, instead of this earnestness for two hours.”

The version of the band that has been touring in support of Wonderful Wonderful could perhaps be called Killers 2.0. Of the core four-piece, only Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. have hit the road this time around. The official line is that guitarist Dave Keuning has taken a break to spend time with his family while bassist Mark Stoermer has gone back to college. The two are still considered members of the band, but their spots are currently being filled by long-time touring sidemen Ted Sablay (guitar) and Jake Blanton (bass).

Flowers insists that it no longer feels strange to look around the stage during a Killers concert and not see Keuning and Stoermer.

“In the beginning it did, but we’ve already done 115 shows now,” he notes. “So, all those anxieties are kind of over now. The way I’ve always looked at it is that it’s my job to sing, whether they’re there or not. I still have a job to do, and of course in a perfect world they would be gung ho about touring and be up there, but they’re not. My dream still lives. My dream’s still alive, man.”

As for what the future holds, Flowers indicates that Keuning “is still figuring it all out” and points out that Stoermer remains very much an active presence within the band, his absence from the tour bus notwithstanding.

“Mark contributed a lot to the record and is more excited about being creative in the studio, and you can’t fault him for not loving touring, and so if that works out, where he can come in the studio, of course he’s welcome, and right now we’re planning on it,” the frontman says.

Mind you, Flowers admits that he’s not sure if there’s a Killers record on the immediate horizon or if he’ll revive his solo career. The singer has released two records under his own name—2010’s Flamingo and 2015’s The Desired Effect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both have topped the U.K. album chart, which strongly suggests that there are indeed many people out there eagerly awaiting a new Brandon Flowers LP.

“I made those solo records so that people could have breaks in the band,” Flowers states, “and so with this new configuration and this new understanding, it seems like it’s created a world where we can put more Killers records out. But also I’m really proud and happy with my two solo records, and I miss performing those songs too, so I’m a little bit torn at the moment.”

If the music thing doesn’t work out, Flowers returning to the world of golf is probably out of the question, all things considered. If Alice Cooper happens to call, however…

“He’s asked me before,” Flowers says. “I’ve had shoulder problems and I haven’t been able to golf as much as I want to. But I would like to golf with Alice Cooper one day. I hope I can get my shoulders back to a place where I can play without pain, and I will take Alice on.”

Ladies and gents, you’re looking at The Man.