Also, Brandon credits "his faith" for his sobriety, which made him "more wholesome."
[quote] The Passion of Brandon Flowers: On His Solo Album, Kicking Booze, and Mitt Romney’s Mormon Shame
Brandon Flowers is mid-rant. If you’ve had the distinct pleasure of meeting the placid, incredibly soft-spoken frontman of The Killers, it’s a rare sight. His publicist is desperate for him to stop, waving her hands in the air, but something has struck a serious nerve.
“When I listen to a rock radio station in Las Vegas, I don’t hear rock ’n’ roll,” he says, shaking his head in frustration. “I don’t even hear fragments of it, and it’s frustrating. I’m not in the most rock ’n’ roll band on the planet, but you can trace what we do to those roots, and I can’t hear it on the radio anymore. And I don’t hear anything that’s good. I’m not being a dick, but I don’t hear anything that’s good.”
He pauses to take a breath. “Everyone goes into their living room, fires up their computer, and are just putting stuff out, and they haven’t earned the right to be where they’re at. These kids that make these keyboard records, it drives me nuts! It’s like, ‘Do you hear New Order? Do you hear it? Because yours is not as good as that! Go back and work harder.’ It’s so strange to me, and there’s so much of it.”
The new wave artist isn’t done. He declares “DJs’ names should not be on songs,” and points to his own dealings with DJs in the past. For years, he says, numerous DJs have tried contacting him through various avenues with the hope of having him sing a hook on one of their dance songs—only the songs aren’t theirs, just the beats. “They don’t write any of their own songs!” he says incredulously. “I’m on the phone with some random guy in Norway who actually wrote the song, talking it through. It’s crazy.”
But Brandon Flowers does write his own songs, thank you very much. He’s written 10 of them for his second solo album, The Desired Effect, which hits stores May 19. Variegated and often sing-along worthy, it’s a big step forward from his previous solo effort, 2010’s Flamingo. Heck its catchy lead single, “Can’t Deny My Love,” has even received the Lorde’s blessing.
We’re seated at the Club Room of New York’s Soho Grand Hotel—a venue that bills itself as “melding downtown style and old New York gentility,” and is filled with leather chairs and a massive framed photo of a circa-1960s Sean Connery in a bathtub hanging on the wall. The 33-year-old singer, meanwhile, is slim, clean-cut, and all-American, like the mild-mannered little brother to Jason Sudeikis (with whom he shares Lithuanian roots).
The previous evening, Flowers turned in a rousing performance at New York’s Webster Hall, wowing the crowd with a mix of newbies and Killers classics like “Mr. Brightside” and a reworked “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine.” And while Flowers has a Jimmy Stewart-aw shucks persona in person, onstage he transforms into a galvanized, wildly gesticulating performer.
“You know, it took a long time,” he says of his stage presence. “I’ve probably done over 1,000 shows now. I just learned to enjoy it more and more, and that’s started to show, and you feel like you’ve earned your place there. There are people who come out onstage and feel like they belong, but it’s taken me a bit longer to get there.”
That journey began in Henderson, Nevada. Flowers is the youngest of six. “You can forget that a person you’re listening to or a person on a marquee has real-life experiences,” he says. “I have four sisters who are all much older than me, so I grew up with the whole plethora of experiences that people go through—divorces, and all these things that go on. I’m not removed from these things.”
One of his biggest life-changing experiences was the transformation of his father, Terry, from a third-generation alcoholic to a loving father—a change he credits to the Mormon faith.
