Brandon Flowers’ killer solo album
Brandon Flowers puts the success of new album The Desired Effect down in part to friction in the studio between himself and producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Vampire Weekend, Haim).
The Killers frontman returns with his second solo outing next week, the follow-up to 2010’s Flamingo. The Desired Effect is an impressive step up, embracing 80s new wave, as evidenced on first single Can’t Deny My Love. But working to Rechtshaid’s busy schedule was tricky.
“It wasn’t always easy,” Flowers says from home in Las Vegas. “He’s pretty in-demand so it was difficult for me to get him to Las Vegas and for me to get away from my family and go to LA. So we did it in increments.
“We didn’t always see eye to eye but I think some of the contention ended up making the album better than if it had been too easy.”
In an unlikely Australian connection, it was the Killers’ Big Day Out tour in 2013 that inspired the collaboration between the so-hot-right-now producer and Flowers.
“We were doing a festival in Australia with Vampire Weekend when their record came out and I was hearing those songs. Then I heard the Haim record and our tour manager loved Sky Ferreira, so his name kept coming up,” Flowers says.
While work with super-producers Brendan O’Brien, Daniel Lanois and Stuart Price on Flamingo paved the way for those producers to work on the Killers’ most-recent album, 2012’s Battle Born, Flowers says there will need to be changes if Rechtshaid is to come on board for the Killers’ fifth.
“It definitely came up and I’m sure he would want to do it,” Flowers laughs. “I think we’d have to change the approach. We have an old-school approach of getting in and getting together and climbing this mountain of making a great record. I don’t want him to have time for whoever else is calling, we need to get him away from it all.”
The amazing 80s have been a fertile source of inspiration for the Killers, going all the way back to the synth-pop of debut Hot Fuss. While Flowers rates Sam’s Town as his favourite Killers album because “we were willing to do something so different and I think it was a brave thing to do at that time”, The Desired Effect borrows from their spectrum of influences, from Springsteen to Duran Duran.
“I was born in 1981 and for the first nine years of my life that was all I heard on the radio,” Flowers says. “I think we’ve always kept one foot in that world and then the other foot is trying to go to the future. I definitely didn’t shy away from it and Ariel wanted to embrace that.”
While he says he and the Killers guitarist Dave Keuning have been exchanging riffs for his day band’s next outing, he expects solo albums to remain a regular fixture. Some of his bandmates prefer extended breaks between records and the subsequent touring.
“I feel like this is my job now and if there’s going to be a big gap between Killers records I don’t know what I would do with myself,” Flowers says.
“We didn’t grow up together and you can’t really tell the future — it seemed in the beginning we were set to conquer the world but it also takes its toll on you.
“A couple of the guys want to take bigger breaks between records and I can’t really blame them, so we’ve got to let everybody have their space so we can be the best we can be when we do get back together,” he adds. “I’m still proud to be the singer of the Killers and I hope our best record is still in us.”
Whether that means a solo tour of Australia after he skipped us on the Flamingo run will likely come down to how the album sells. Fingers crossed, because the Las Vegas showman is a great performer and the chance to see him in more intimate surrounds could be something special.
“I’m just an Elvis impersonator, that’s all any of us are,” Flowers laughs. “Back (in the beginning) I felt I had to use a little bit of liquid courage to get out on stage, but as time’s gone on, and I think I’ve got a thousand shows under my felt now, I feel like I belong up there.”
The Desired Effect is released May 15.
