By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Brandon Flowers has spent two decades filling stadiums with The Killers' brand of shimmering, anthemic rock. So it's a small jolt to hear him, on his new solo album, asking a much quieter question: was any of it worth it?
According to BBC Entertainment & Arts, Flowers' third solo effort takes an unexpected detour into country music, a genre he's flirted with before but never fully inhabited. The shift in sound seems to track a shift in subject. Rather than the widescreen romanticism that made "Mr. Brightside" a karaoke staple, Flowers is reportedly turning inward, interrogating the cost of celebrity after a career built on it.
It's a familiar move for rock frontmen of a certain age and altitude — the fame-is-a-cage record has practically become its own subgenre. What makes Flowers' version worth a listen, per the BBC's reporting, is the specificity of his doubt. He isn't posing as a reluctant star who never wanted the spotlight; he chased it, got it, and is now old enough to count what it cost him. That's a harder, more honest position than most rock stars bother to take.
Country music, with its inherited traditions of plain speech and hard-luck narration, gives him a different vocabulary for that reckoning than the synth-driven sweep of The Killers ever could. Whether the genre swap holds up over a full album — or plays as a costume change for an artist between big ideas — is the kind of thing only the record itself can answer.
[Note to editor: full track listing, release date, and direct quotes from Flowers were not available in the source material and should be confirmed before further coverage.]
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."