I’m seeing a lot of strong notice of this video of former Killers frontman Brandon Flowers performing on The Tonight Show.
In my little corner of the internet — which is probably not the same corner as yours, though maybe there’s some overlap — I’m seeing a lot of strong notice of this video of former Killers frontman Brandon Flowers performing on The Tonight Show. The song, “An American Dream,” is from his new solo record Thrasher.
I was never more than a casual fan of The Killers. Their debut Hot Fuss was smack dab in the middle of the 2000s post-punk revival, which was on the one hand maybe the last great aesthetic movement of American rock and on the other a signal of its degeneration into recycled self-reference and decline. There’s still lots of good stuff out there, but after the 2000s, rock got steadily less relevant and has been stuck in a kind of synthy minimalism that’s neither as hooky as the original new wave nor as distinctive. Maybe it’s just being middle-aged, but I have a hard time these days telling if a song I vaguely remember came out in 2007 or 2023.
Anyway, after Hot Fuss, Flowers led the Killers down a Springsteen-y road of Americana or “Heartland Rock” starting with their follow-up Sam’s Town. Big-swing emotion without the wallowing self-pity of emo, expansive landscapes of both nostalgia and rebirth, and anthemic, swelling choruses (“We’re burning down the highway skyline / On the back of a hurricane / that started turning / When you were young”).
I didn’t pay much attention to the records the Killers put out between then and now, but having listened to a bunch of tracks on Thrasher, I can see why people are connecting with it — and with “An American Dream” in particular. A lot of it is in the video and the performance, not just the song. Flowers has long been counted as one of the most compelling frontmen working, and it’s on display here, with the bolo and rhinestones, the earnestness, and the physicality. Popular music has been dominated by three types of performance for almost 50 years: choreographed dance and costume numbers, headbanging, and just standing there and gazing at your shoes. There isn’t much of what Flowers gives here, a kind of fully committed thematic pantomime accompaniment.
The tune itself is great. A hook precision-engineered for bar singalongs and a lyric full of James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy-level American arcana and myth (“Strauss and Stetson,” “an ad for the Red Man,” and Elvis Presley in “jet-black ’68 comeback leather”). It’s also fully, unapologetically a song about God — a distinctively American, distinctively American West God, which makes sense since Flowers’s God is Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints.
Anyway, it’s great, and it’s nice to see a Jimmy Fallon crowd of all things get that it’s great. Take a gander:
