Brandon Flowers: Is fame worth it? I'm not sure anymore

Brandon Flowers has a confession.

For the last 25 years, he's been the frontman of The Killers, channelling his love of stadium rock and British new wave on songs like Mr Brightside, When You Were Young and Human.

But in the back of his mind, there's always been an alternative soundtrack.

"You know, a lot of guys in my line of business develop drug addictions," he says.

"I got a country addiction."

It started when he was a kid in Nephi, Utah. His dad would play Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and John Conlee on the car stereo. School dances, held at the local golf club, would always feature country and western slow dances.

So when Flowers moved back home and started revisiting his childhood haunts, his passion for country was rekindled.

You can hear the results on his third solo album, Thrasher, recorded in Nashville's famed RCA Studio A - home to Dolly Parton's Jolene and I Will Always Love You - with a group of veteran musicians that included pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, and Americana musician Margo Price.

"I sang live with them and I think they really appreciated that, because it's a very romantic way of doing it," he says.

"It's not something that people do anymore. To actually get that energy down on tape is a different thing."

It's an album he couldn't have made in his 20s.

Flowers once said his "experiences weren't interesting enough" to be turned into lyrics. Now, he's excavating his diary to write about his rural upbringing and experiences of working in Las Vegas casinos.

There's also a tribute to his brother-in-law, who died suddenly several years ago and, on Miss America, a critique of the opioid crisis that hit his hometown.

"It's a sad thing, you know? It's basically doctors prescribing people heroin, and it took so many lives unnecessarily."

Prescription painkillers are chemically similar to but not the same as heroin.

He adds: "Even just in my graduating class in that little town, so many of the kids are gone. It's kind of staggering. Such a dirty business."

The album also finds Flowers taking stock of his own life. On American Dream, he fantasises about meeting Elvis Presley (in a flying Tesla, no less) and asking him whether fame and fortune is all it's cracked up to be.

Elvis just laughs - but it's a question that's plagued Flowers for years.

"Sometimes I wonder, what am I trying to achieve, and what am I trying to prove, and who am I trying to prove it to, and what have I gotten from it?" he says.

The song came from a conversation he had with his three teenage sons, "because I worry about them comparing themselves to my success".

Flowers has always been careful to isolate his family from the effects of fame. "We don't talk about it much. There's no gold records hanging in the bathroom or anything like that." And he emphasises that success doesn't automatically bring contentment.

"My dad didn't have that, but is he less happy than me? He may even be more happy than I am.

"He made $25,000 a year and barely got by but he's 82 and he paints, and he goes to garage sales, and he's, like, pumped for that.

"So yeah, I don't know if it's worth it. I don't know anymore."

It's easy to understand his ambivalence. Flowers is not your typical rock star. He's quietly spoken and self-effacing. His anecdotes are punctuated with nervous laughter, although he's better at making eye contact than when we first met in the Killers' heyday.

In those interviews, he talked about battling stage fright, and the difficulties of balancing touring commitments with family life.

But as he approaches his 21st wedding anniversary, he says that periodic absences from home can have unexpected benefits.

"There's a danger you could grow apart, but there's also this great rediscovery that can happen, and a freshness it can bring, when you return."

He takes commitment seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he's desperate to make amends for a lyric on the last Killers album, called In Another Life, that made some fans question their relationships.

"In the song, the man is concerned about his situation, and he's asking his wife, 'Am I the man of your dreams, or just a guy from your hometown?'," he explains.

"He's wondering if their proximity is the only reason they're together. And I noticed it was making people look at their relationships in a negative light.

"At one point someone said they got divorced because of this line, and I thought, 'How can I fix this?'"

The answer was to write a new song, Does It Ever Cross Your Mind, that reframed the argument.

"Of all the corners of the universe / We wound up hand in hand," he sings over a twangy banjo. "Some may call it a coincidence / But I prefer design."

It's one of 23 songs he recorded in Nashville over a period of just three weeks.

Only 10 made the cut for Thrasher. The other 13 are being mixed "in the slowest, slowest possible way" for a separate album, maybe next year.

All this solo activity doesn't mean the end of The Killers, although he admits, "I don't know what the future holds" for the band.

"We're still together, we're still going to make another record [but] there's something beautiful about ageing gracefully," he says.

A student of music history, he knows that longevity requires evolution - and this new batch of country songs could even signpost The Killers' next incarnation.

To put it another way, Flowers can't imagine pretending to be the 20-year-old who wrote Mr Brightside in his friend's bedroom for the rest of his life.

"It's a shame when you see people doing that and trying to hold on," he says. "I always bring up John Lennon or Tom Petty as great examples of [musicians] inhabiting their age."

There's a curious sadness to his predicament. Falling in love with music is a radically different proposition to making it your career; and, like many middle-aged rock bands, The Killers feel beholden to their earliest hits.

Flowers is still grateful to those songs. "It never gets old, feeling the [crowd's] anticipation for When You Were Young, or All These Things That I've Done, or whatever it is."

But the side-effect of spending his life on the stage is that he can no longer enjoy watching other people in concert.

"It's lost the allure to me because that's where I go to work, you know?

"I used to be enthralled. I couldn't believe I was so lucky to be there, seeing Morrissey for the first time, or seeing The Cure for the first time. It was heaven. That feeling is gone."

But he's not despondent. In fact, he's looking forward to touring Thrasher, simply for the joy of playing new material, and re-arranging some of the classics. And there's one band who he thinks could revive his love of live music…. The band who inspired him to form The Killers in the first place.

"You know what? I was kicking against the Oasis reunion - not because I'm not happy they got back together, but because everyone was just an Oasis fan all of a sudden, even in America, and I sort of railed against it.

"But now I have a son who is 15 who has fallen in love with Oasis. He's learned [their songs] on guitar, and I'll play the piano, rehashing these songs that I loved when I was 19. So I think I would probably feel it again if I went to see Oasis."

Liam and Noel, the ball is in your court.