How Sam's Town Should've Ended

I talked a lot of shit about Brandon Flowers last week, and I stand by all of it. I will continue to talk shit about him here but also:

A Tinder match once asked me what song I couldn’t stop listening to and I was fool enough to tell the truth: track ten from The Killers’ sophomore album. They never replied and I don’t blame them one bit. I was home for the holidays after my first semester of grad school and physically incapable of spinning anything other than Sam’s Town. I was born in a town with no stoplights and more cows than people, so The Killers’ carnival ride in and out of small towns and sin was inevitably going to leave its mark on me.

I grew up near the birthplace of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and attended high with kids whose post-grad plans weren’t college, the military, or the workforce, but Mission. Kids who went out in their pimples and pressed pants to spread The Word. This was not so unusual, and made sense to me, an English teacher’s pet, who understood the archetypal American story of going Away and Coming Home. Even my adolescent atheist ass had some respect for their plunge into elsewhere.

Brandon Flowers is a student of the American mythos, as well as a born-and-raised Mormon. It jumps out on occasion, but mostly melds into the vague Jesus flavor of heartland rock music. I don’t know if Flowers went on Mission, or believes his touring band counts, either way, I can see the scorned evangelist in his heart. The true purpose of Mission, or the Amish rumspringa, or the college conversion squad on the campus quad, is not to save the heathens or to reach personal enlightenment; it is to get rejected. To be told “No” enough times that you believe the only people who know you and can understand you are the ones you left behind. Of course, coming home looks different for us all. When I reconnected with kids who went on Mission it was like we were speaking different languages. We were not the same people as before, and as disquieting as it was for me, I’m sure they felt their own alienation. This is the discomfort at the heart of Sam’s Town.

Absolutepunk.net described The Gaslight Anthem’s The ‘59 Sound, as “the album The Killers wanted to make with Sam’s Town but were unsuccessful at.” As far as Bruce Springsteen wannabes go, Brian Fallon will always have my heart over Brandon Flowers and his B-Team Band. Yet I think these records make sense of one another. The Gaslight Anthem writes songs about nostalgia you know you shouldn’t feel—the contradictions of regret and rage and relief that come from aging out of and back into romanticism. The nostalgia of Sam’s Town and Brandon Flowers’ is not always so self-aware, yet one can read their narrators as unreliable, and sympathize with the similarities we see between them and our own unfortunate selves. Ah, wouldn’t it be great to believe so fully in the splendor of our memories? Their sharp golden edges only accentuated by the grim and grisly phantoms, the Uncle Johnny’s who did cocaine, the seedy casinos for which the album is named. These characters need the comfort of the familiar because they’ve seen a world they don’t understand, and they believe doesn’t understand them either. We all know life wasn’t better Back Then, but The Killers let us entertain the fiction for a spell.

By now, and in my opinion by 2009, The Killers were too far gone for self-awareness. In an interview with Flowers about their latest effort, Pressure Machine, he describes taking the unprecedented step to…write lyrics before entering the studio. Absolutely maddening that his past work is revealed to be some struck-by-lightning moments of inspiration, and that when he actually sits down and thinks about it, he hasn’t got anything much to say. Phoebe Bridgers, who admits to living in the thrall of this band as I do, deserves so much better than her tepid feature on the album’s middling middle song. If The Killers were going to live up to their Springsteenian ideals the time has come and gone. The closest they ever came was the fabulous farewell of “This River Is Wild.”

There are two more songs on Sam’s Town after “River”, yet to me this is where the album’s exit is strongest. “Why Do I Keep Counting?” is too synth heavy and heady (the Mormonism creeping in) to relate to the rest of the albums earthly concerns, and the little ditty reprise of “Exitlude” appeals to my rock-opera starved soul, but offers nothing new to the narrative, only closes the circle started with “Enterlude” and makes ham-fisted the album’s journey.

“River” opens with “a story from a man in red”, a prophet (more Mormon stuff) urging the song’s subject to “run for the hills before they burn, listen to the sound of the world, don’t watch it turn.” This song, like every great Bruce ballad, screams: escape! In 2006 self-awareness was not beyond Flowers’ grasp. The Sam’s Town we’ve seen up until this point was not the great unknown, but the familiar, which turns out is not so friendly. This is the critical moment of reflection in The Killers’ journey. What if a homecoming is hollow? What if all the rejection one receives from the cruel, uncaring outside follows you back home? Maybe running away and never looking back isn’t such a romantic notion, but a necessary step towards survival.

This momentum, however, is broken by the song’s close. It’s the most moving line of The Killers canon to me. (In second place: the buried scream, “Sam!” during the solo on “When You Were Young.”) The young narrator sets the scene,

The show is over, all the glitz and glamor of the traveling circus, who are I think, The Killers themselves in the third-person, is gone. Yet what dazzles the child most are the cars headed home. Don’t you remember when you were young, and the simplest things seemed like the stars come down from above? That kid isn’t going anywhere. Running away doesn’t even occur to him. “The circus and the crew, well they’re just passing through, making sure that merry still goes round.” This pun kills me. Merry-go-round. Spread some cheer, make that merry go round. The band, the music, the pomp and circumstance, are passing fancies to remind us of the quiet comforts, the home to which we can always return.

You and I know it isn’t true: home does not hold still in amber, and The Killers are one of the most popular bands of their era. The folksy small-town act grates coming from the same mouth that sighs international superhit “Mr. Brightside.” Yet I can appreciate the alternate universe where Flowers is still that kid starstruck by all the headlights headed home from the county fair, because it is the same kid I wish I still was—though I know better now.

Thank god that’s over. Which Killers’ song is better: “Mr. Brightside” or “When You Were Young"? Choose carefully, the fate of all mankind lies in your hands. Do you ever get Brandon Flowers and Brendon Urie mixed up? Do you think their mothers do? Text me, I’m on my lunch break.