The
Killers can check off all the classic milestones of rock 'n' roll greatness:
They've worn elaborate costumes involving feather epaulettes and occasionally
moustaches; they've starred in a desert-set video that features a long,
meditative shot of a soaring eagle; their frontman sports meticulously applied
eyeliner; they have a devout following in Germany; a colossal light-up sign
spells out their band name onstage. But they aren't a rock 'n' roll band, or at
least not exclusively: The Killers' 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, spawned a trio of
impeccable singles and established the group as the go-to ensemble for dark,
synth-laden post-punk about philandering lovers and boys who look like girls.
Its follow-up, 2006's Sam's Town, was a sprawling, unapologetically bombastic rock
opus with more debts to Springsteen than Bowie. The new Day And Age is the band's glammiest,
most pop-friendly effort to date. A few days before its release, The A.V.
Club sat
down with frontman Brandon Flowers and guitarist Dave Keuning to discuss
aliens, bravado, and the wild, wild West.
The
A.V. Club: What is this moment like for you, as a band, waiting for a new
record to come out?
Dave
Keuning:
I guess we're anxious for it to be out there.
Brandon
Flowers:
We're excited. Obviously, we wouldn't be putting it out if we didn't think it
was ready. So there's an anticipation within us. We're hoping that it
translates.
AVC:
The Killers have always had a considerable visual presence. How important is it
to you that the image and the art correlate?
BF: The image is very much a
part of the art.
DK: I think that everybody
has an image, even if they choose to do nothing—then that's their image.
But everyone has an image.
BF: We follow the direction
of the songs, which is almost opposite to what a purist might think it should
be. I guess a purist would say that the music is an exaggeration, or an example
of their life. We almost do the opposite—we follow where the songs go.
But I guess the songs are coming from us, so it's just where we are. It's just
a weird circle. We change. We aren't the same four guys who wrote Sam's Town or Hot Fuss, and we're doing our best
to represent that.
AVC:
There's an awful lot of saxophone on the new record.
DK: Mark [Stoermer, Killers
bassist] had always wanted a sax solo. We're open to the use of all
instruments. We really didn't realize how big of a decision we were making at
the time.
AVC:
Until journalists started pointing it out to you?
DK: [Laughs.] We were just
like, "Let's have a sax, it'll be cool." I like how it turned out.
BF: There's no such thing as
a bad instrument. We were really open to new things on this album. It really
made it more enjoyable, it made it fun.
AVC:
You don't hear a lot of saxophone on pop radio anymore.
BF: It's greasy. [Laughs.]
AVC:
The most palpable touchstone for Day And Age is '80s new-wave pop
like Talk Talk, The Human League, Pet Shop Boys. But in certain spots, there's
also a lot of Motown, a lot of Chicago soul.
DK: We have a lot of
different influences, for sure. Interesting that you bring up the soul bit.
It's in there, somewhere.
BF: We listen to that via
David Bowie. Motown, things like that, they're unavoidable. That's American music.
AVC:
"Spaceman" is about being kidnapped by aliens. I know you're relatively close
to Area 51. How literally should people take the lyrics?
BF: There's a deep-seated
fascination with all things extraterrestrial.
AVC:
Really?
BF: Yes! I think it's in everybody.
Everybody's got a little gleam in their eye when they talk about it.
AVC:
Have you seen Fire In The Sky?
BF: I loved Fire In The
Sky. Have
you seen Fire In The Sky?
DK: No! How old is it?
BF: I think I was 8 [when it
came out]. I'm 27. It's supposed to be a true story. These guys are camping,
and one of them just gets taken from the forest. You should see it. They do a
really good job. Those guys really believed.
AVC:
I found that movie terrifying—he's literally lifted into a spaceship by a
beam of light.
BF: Well, you were 10. Watch
it now. It's probably embarrassing and ridiculous.
AVC:
But those lyrics work on a not-so-literal level, too.
BF: Yeah, you could draw
parallels with many things. It's almost a parable.
AVC:
There seems to be reluctance to settle on one particular sound for too
long—do you think about each new record as an opportunity for evolution?
Are you afraid of sounding the same?
DK: It's just been the way
it's worked for us. We have a lot of different influences, and we're not afraid
to try different sounds or directions. It just depends on our mood around the
time we're making an album. We may want to try different things in a different
year.
BF: Change is inevitable.
We're not afraid of sounding the same, but we're also not afraid of embracing
what's happening. We just take it and go with it. This could have just as
easily been Sam's Town, part two. But when we got together, it just wasn't.
AVC:
Lyrically, there seems to be a vague longing, a demand for a more
old-fashioned, more visceral way of living. Is it a response to an accelerated
culture, or just a product of getting older, having children, things like that?
BF: Yeah, simpler times. I
think it's a very exciting time right now. [Laughs.] No, I do. You don't know
what someone's going to invent next to make our lives easier, and that's
awesome. But at the same time, we are losing some basic human functions on the
way. I bring up romance and devotion, things like that. It's sad that it's old-fashioned.
It's sad that that seems strange to people who are coming of age now.
AVC: People are losing social skills. I can barely make a
phone call anymore.
BF: Let alone just saying "hi"
to someone on the street. It freaks people out. I try to do it as much as I
can, just to watch the reactions. There's always a breath, for a second, while
they look at you. "Why did he say 'hi' to me?" Me and Dave, even though we're
based in Las Vegas, we came up in similar towns, small towns. They're holding onto
it more in those places. I grew up watching my dad wave to every car that drove
by. Little things like that, you don't see that anymore.
AVC:
The chorus to "Human" is taken from a Hunter S. Thompson quote. Are you big
fans of his?
BF: No more than anybody
else. One thing I've learned is that in France, Fear And Loathing In Las
Vegas is
translated as Las Vegas Paranoid. [Laughs.] I'm always learning something new.
AVC:
Do you take inspiration from literature often?
BF: To be honest, I don't
read a whole lot. I've been struggling with writing lyrics, so I've really been
trying to pick up on it. I read On The Road for the first time while
we were making this album. I'm a little late there. But it's been a whole new
world for me.
AVC:
Did you like it?
BF:
It was exciting. By about the fourth or fifth trip back west, I must admit, I
got a little… There are less characters by his fourth trip. He could have
stopped it after three.
AVC:
Well, it really mythologizes the American West—a lot of people do,
especially people from the East Coast. It's all cowboys and sunsets.
BF: It's good to have your
fantasies. And some of it is a reality. That life still exists out there.
AVC:
Do you think you'd write different music if you lived somewhere else?
BF: It's beautiful [in
Nevada]. I love visiting New York City and London and Paris—the romantic
element of it—but after 10 days or so, I yearn for the sky to open up,
for the mountains. It's wide open where we live, it really is.
DK: I love
playing shows. It's tough being away from home, but we enjoy what we're doing:
We have a job where we get to play music and celebrate songs that we worked
hard to write and record.
BF: We get to
go places we never would have gone. I don't even know if I knew where Panama
was before we played there.
AVC:
Is your music received differently across the globe?
DK: Some places, it's
dramatically different. In Europe, you've got to go country by country. In
Germany, it's really picked up. Hot Fuss was lukewarm, but Sam's Town went much better, and "Human"
is getting played on the radio there a lot, I hear. So we're happy about that.
BF: As big as you think we
are, if you look at how we've done it, we're really going step by step. A lot
of people think we just exploded, and that's it. But we really tried to make it
a homegrown type of thing, from the evolution of the band to the way we choose
to tour. It's all going according to plan.
AVC:
Even with all the added arrangements, in some ways the new record feels really
stripped down—there's more empty space. In a way, it makes sense with
what we were just talking about, about the West being a place where the
landscape opens up.
BF: There's a lot more space
[on Day And Age].
I think it's a sign of maturity, and I think it's awesome that we've gotten to
that point, but I suffer with that space live. I'm used to this freight train
of a show that we put on, and I can run around. Now all of a sudden, there's
breathing room. Dave has this long solo at the end of "Losing Touch," and I
don't know what the hell to do while he's doing it.
DK: Come party with me.
BF: I love the solo, I love
it, but what do I do? We're learning. It's still fun.
AVC:
Did you feel like you needed to respond to people who thought Sam's Town was too bombastic?
BF: [Laughs.] I don't know if
it was a response. Do you think it was a response to Sam's Town being overblown?
DK: I didn't even notice that
until you two brought it up. I guess there is [more space]. I think we're
getting better at making songs. I don't want people to think that sounds cocky…
We are writing better songs, I think. But we're getting better at making songs.
Having done this for four or five years, we've written in different ways, and I
think now we're getting better at it. Whether they're good or not is not for us
to decide, but we're getting better at making them and recording them. Maybe
part of maturing and getting better at it is having adequate space here and
there.
AVC:
A lot of the work you did with [producer] Stuart Price was over e-mail. Was
this the first time you'd worked that way?
BF: Yeah. It made it real
fresh, I think. It was almost like pre-production was underway as soon as we
hit "send" on an idea. He'd send something back, and we'd all fight about it,
or embrace about it, and then we met for a month and sealed the deal. I just
read this article on that new Eno and Byrne record. They did exactly what we
did. They e-mailed the whole thing, and then got together for two weeks and
finished it. They beat us to the punch. We thought we were gonna be, you know,
matadors.
AVC:
Is there an advantage to working that way?
DK: It's convenient. Even
when people live in the same town, you spend time apart. But if you get a song
idea at home, you can just e-mail it. You don't have to leave your house. And
they can hear it, they can play on it if they want to, they can mess around
with it. And then when you're in the same room, you have a head start on what
the song is.
AVC:
Did you specifically want a producer who had experience with dance music?
DK: It was never brought up
like that. We just happened to like Stuart's work. He's really good to work
with and knows his stuff, he knows all about recording and plays almost every
instrument.
BF: We got along with him,
too. That's something we take into consideration just as much. We loved [Sam's
Town
co-producers] Flood and Alan Moulder. And it was almost hard to move on, but it
was just the right time.
AVC:
The production is really clean, really pristine.
BF: He's capable of so many
things. We have this Christmas song coming out that's really down-home, it's
not a dance song, and it sounds great.
AVC:
Lyrically, the syntax is really precise. Is that something you spend a lot of
time thinking about? The rhythm and meter of language?
BF: It's selfish, almost,
because I know I'm going to be singing the songs, and I want them to be fun to
sing. So sometimes there's a heartbeat, a flow to them. [I've got] more rhythm
than most people, I think. It's difficult to do that, because you also want to
tell a story and have people believe it. Pound for pound, I think this is the
best I've ever done, this album.