Album of the week: Brandon Flowers – 'Thrasher'

The last time Brandon Flowers fully leant into the heartland music on which he was raised in Nevada and Utah, it was 20 years ago. Sam’s Town was The Killers’ epic, desert-wide take on Bruce Springsteen’s East Coast Americana, and the band’s second album was huge in the UK and beyond. But, ironically enough, it stiffed in the US. As frontman Flowers told me a couple of years after its release, at home Sam’s Town sold less than half of its predecessor, the Las Vegas band’s three million-selling 2004 debut Hot Fuss.

Now, on his third solo album, here he is again, channelling the music his dad called “country-western”. Worried, much, about it, too, tanking? Not a bit of it. For this formerly unashamedly numbers-focused rock star, commercial success “is not as important to me anymore,” he told me earlier this summer. That said, he added, he was aware that that position is “also a luxury of having the [band’s career-long] success. It's not lost on me.” Equally, he had only recently heard, courtesy of a producer friend, the phrase "Good art is its own reward." It was a new one on the 45-year-old dad to three teenage boys. “But I understood it, I had felt it before, but no one had ever expressed it to me."

So to Thrasher, a record on which this practising Mormon and stadium-filler who can crowd-please like the holy lovechild of Elvis’n’Elton goes full double-denim – “the Canadian tuxedo!” as he put it to me while dressed in exactly that. And as befits a set of songs from this time-served anthem-merchant that are influenced by family, faith and fatherhood, it’s an impassioned collection of downhome songs straight from heart and hearth.

Flowers doesn’t mess around in doffing his Stetson: the opening ‘Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?’ is a straight-up country song that wouldn’t appear out of place on the jukebox on a Taylor Sheridan drama. It features lines such as “I could have been born in Bangladesh, but I wasn’t, I was born here” and “some may call it coincidence, I prefer design” speaking to, respectively, his pride in his homeland and, it seems, this man of God’s belief in Creationism.

But don’t let either of those ideas put you off. Firstly, Flowers is no Trumpist America First-er – “this administration has been scary,” he said to me, worry lines creasing his rock-star brow. Secondly, thereafter, Flowers gets invigoratingly less route one/Route 66. If someone had told me that the gorgeous ‘Plans’ was a great lost Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell collaboration, I would not have disbelieved them. ‘Paradise’ is a twanging hymn to a paradise lost: the Las Vegas that formed young Brandon, teenage bellhop in a Sin City casino, and his extended clan.

Brandon Flowers - Paradise (Official Lyric Video) - YouTube

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He further excavates the family Flowers on two powerfully evocative mini-dramas worthy of a happy-hour Cormac McCarthy. ‘Miss America’ is a guileless, tear-jerking, pedal-steeled written from the perspective of his sister Shelly. Fifteen years older than this youngest of six, she was trapped in an abusive marriage that it’s taken her baby brother the best part of three decades to reckon with. "You used to call me Miss America before you got hooked on speed,” he sings in that rich, Presley-meets-Bono quaver. “Maybe I'll go and get me a Mormon boy, ones that treats me like a queen.” *

The boot-scooting ‘One of Us’ is similarly radio- and jukebox-friendly, and another tribute to another family member. Mike was married to Flowers’ sister April, 17 years his senior. His passing a couple of years ago deeply affected the musician, hence this simple, charming and folksy tribute to a Canadian brother-in-law who was “always one of us”.

Thrasher ends with a song called ‘An American Dream’. “Of course it does,” a Euro-atheist-cynic might say. But it’s no MAGA-swagger. Rather it’s a near-six-minute, end-of-the night, swaying-on-a-haybale singalong, conjuring images of his beloved parents, a Tesla-driving Elvis (resplendent, natch, in his ’68 Comeback Special black leathers), plus Presley daughter Lisa-Marie, Jesus, “God and glitter” and “lights that flicker on hubcap chrome”, Flowers singing – beseeching – of a desire to “take me back home”. It’s another dustland fairytale from this unabashed romantic, and a fitting close to an album that takes us all back home, no matter how distant we are from desert of any kind.

*And, reader, she divorced him. Then Shelly did indeed meet and marry a loving Mormon boy. Romance isn’t dead, it just takes a while sometimes.