The Killers’ Brandon Flowers was interviewed by Radio X’s Toby Tarrant yesterday. Please find content below if of interest.
Brandon revealed that he thought texts from Bruce Springsteen were a wind-up and that their ‘Dustland’ collaboration is “one of those pinch me moments”.
He felt “a little nervous” releasing the band’s new album ‘Pressure Machine’ as the songs are “austere and have restraint”, and “you do have trepidation - it’s almost like you’re addicted to filling the seats and these big songs.”
Brandon also spoke about Sam Fender saying “that would be a fun little collaboration” and “we love what we’ve heard so far”.
BF: Brandon Flowers
TT: Toby Tarrant (Radio X)
Brandon Flowers says he thought texts from Bruce Springsteen were a wind-up and that their collaboration is “one of those pinch me moments”
TT: Can you please humour me and tell me how that [The Killers’ ‘Dustland’ collaboration with Bruce Springsteen] came about?
BF: Alright, well we were about to go… we were about to leave for England and it got shut down. We were promoting ‘Imploding The Mirage’ and then COVID was just starting to freak people out and then Universal, you know, we’re under the Universal umbrella, and they sort of sent out this blanket email to everybody saying ‘it’s kind of over, or do it at your own risk, but we don’t know what’s going on with COVID if you’re going to do promotion’, so we went home. And I was at the airport, and I started getting these texts from Bruce Springsteen but I didn’t have his number saved on my phone, and so I thought that it was someone messing, you know, I really thought it might be someone messing with me.
And anyway it turned out it was really him but one of the things he was saying was ‘we should do Dustland one day’ and he thought maybe we’d cross paths touring or whatever, and obviously we all know what happened, we got shut down, and after months and months of sitting around I thought ‘why don’t we do a quarantine version of Dustland’. And he was all for it and really cool about it, and we’re just… Man, it’s one of those pinch me moments.
Brandon Flowers said he felt “a little nervous” releasing the band’s new album ‘Pressure Machine’ as the songs are “austere and have restraint”, and “you do have trepidation - it’s almost like you’re addicted to filling the seats and big songs.”
TT: Do you have any doubts when you’re putting out an album like this? Because it would have been very easy for you – ‘Imploding the Mirage’, amazing, got a huge reaction, you know there’s a formula there that works – it would be very easy for you to put out ‘Imploding the Mirage Part 2’ straight away. But you didn’t. Is there any part of you riddled with any sort of self-doubt when you’re putting this together? Or are you going ‘we’re The Killers, we’ll be fine, people are gonna love it’?
BF: Yeah you do have a bit of trepidation. It’s almost like you’re addicted to filling the seats and these big songs and we’ve grown into that. And that’s one of the beautiful things about the band, and the fact that we’re from Las Vegas, we take all these licences that only we’re allowed to and it is a wonderful thing. So when you start to write these songs that are austere and that have restraint, I did wonder what to do with it or how people would perceive it and I was a little nervous, but they just kept coming, the songs kept coming and I'm just really proud of it.
Brandon Flowers on Sam Fender: “that would be a fun little collaboration” as “we love what we’ve heard so far”
TT: Supporting you on a couple of [your UK tour] dates is the brilliant Sam Fender, who is killing it over here. There’s a lot of Springsteen in Sam Fender, he’s been very open about his love for Bruce […] If you could team up with Sam Fender at some point you would make my job so easy…
BF: I still haven't met him yet, but yeah we love what we've heard so far. That would be a fun little collaboration.
