BRANDON FLOWERS
Continued from page 24
Nevada state animal, he explains. "And
there's always a leader, and he'll get
between you and the herd – he lets you
know not to mess with them, but never
have I been charged by one or anything,"
he adds. As a composer, he's equally protective of his influences. When The Killers
released their more saga-centered sophomore record Sam's Town in 2006 – with the
elegiac "When You Were Young" smash –
"there was quite a lot of dust kicked up
about Springsteen," he says. "But I feel like
that fascination that I acquired with him in
my mid-'20s was really profound for me,
because I was stuck with all the clichés –
you know, you want to be David Bowie
and you want to go crazy. And I feel like
Springsteen gave me a way out of that –
you don't associate him with drugs or
excess, or any of these things that you associate rock and roll with. And I was like,
'Oh! I can do it, and I don't have to do any
of this other stuff!' That was very helpful
for me."
He picked up more tricks from Neil
Tennant, with whom he'd grown close
enough to request a cameo vocal on "I Can
Change." "When we were doing our
Christmas song with him, I learned so
much from the way his brain works," he
says. "And things that now seem so obvious to me weren't obvious to me before.
We were talking Joseph, how he was a carpenter, and instantly Neil starts writing
down 'the plane' and 'the lathe' and these
traits of carpenters, and he starts incorporating them into the song." He sighs. "It
was great, watching a master at work like
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