If there is one thing that nobody would ever call me it’s topical. Grandiloquent? Sure. Pessimistic? Ad nauseum! Tedious? Quite possibly. But certainly not topical. You probably could tell as much from the title of this essay.
The first clue is that I am talking about The Killers and specifically the band’s frontman Brandon Flowers. While they remain a well-known group, The Killers today are older and grayer. They don’t occupy quite the same place in the cultural zeitgeist as they did in 2004 when I was roaring around scenic Cottage Grove, Minnesota, listening to Mr. Brightside on full blast. The second clue that I am hardly Mister Relevant is that I am centering this blog on their third release, Day & Age, which came out in 2008 when I was still a sprightly-65-year-old.
Yet I have always been intrigued by the album and the autobiographical connotations of its second single Spaceman. More specifically, I have wanted to examine how the tune seems to discuss alien abduction, but only on the surface. In actually, it is a profound look into how Brandon Flowers’ unique past influenced The Killers’ music before and after its release.
But first thing first: We must explore what I mean when I talk about this so-called past. Only once that is clearly defined can we understand how it is intertwined with the development of The Killers’ music.
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Back in 2011, a rather strange video appeared on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ YouTube page. The video featured a then-30-year-old Brandon Flowers reflecting on his life and career up until that point in time. More specifically, he discusses how he had become disillusioned with the music industry and its materialism after breaking through in 2004 with Hot Fuss – a process fueled, in part, by his Mormon faith.
Eventually, this growing distaste for the industry led him to make significant changes. What this ended up looking like was two-fold. On a personal level, he got married at the oh-so-mature age of 25 and began building a home life in the mold of his Mormon parents: meaning, you guessed it, reproducing like it was going out of, well, fucking style. Far more relevant for our purposes, however, are his claims about how this period changed his musical interests, including the very lyrics he wanted to write going forward.
For your average Flowers’ fan seeing this 12 years ago, the musician’s remarks may have been surprising. After all, this was the guy who once sang about boyfriends looking like girlfriends and how when ladies wear “real short skirts” he wants to “look up, look up, look up, yeah, yeah.”🤮
Yet long before his LDS video premiered, Flowers had telegraphed a desire to evolve musically and suggested that this desire was rooted in his past. The group’s sophomore release, 2006’s Sam’s Town, had broken away from the New Wave paradigm of 2004’s Hot Fuss for heartland rock à la Springsteen: Highways that are “jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive” – that sort of thing.
In a 2009 interview, Flowers stated explicitly how the evolution between Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town was inspired by a resurgent interest in who he was and where he came from:
“Hot Fuss was all based-on
fantasy. The English influences, the makeup — they
were what I imagined rock was. I’m a dreamer, you know? So I dug into that dream and made Hot Fuss. But hearing people call us the best British band from America made me wonder about
my family and who I was. That’s what Sam’s
Town is really about. I was trying to find out who I was.”1
Sam’s Town ended up receiving a less than rosy response from critics, who clearly didn’t like a bunch of 20-something idiots crooning about life and love in the gritty corners of the American West. Flowers’ reaction to such critical reactions in the years after its release offers us another opportunity to see how his attempt to move The Killers forward involved him staring pensively into his rearview mirror.
“Sam’s Town wasn’t some love
letter to America or overreaching mythic thing. It was about me.
I sang about Grandma Dixie and my brother being born on the Fourth of July.
Guess what? My grandma’s name is fucking Dixie, and my brother was born
on the fucking Fourth of July.”2
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When we look at these statements and the Latter-Day Saints’ propaganda, what conclusions can we draw about Flowers? If I wasn’t a fan, I would simply say that this is a man who at this time was, maybe, on the verge of a nervous breakdown? The LDS video alone is so weird you wonder if someone in his orbit had told him to blink hard twice if he needed help.
In all seriousness, though, I would say that this is a man whose love for his past is genuine. It is so genuine, in fact, that it involved taking what had made him a star with Hot Fuss and imperiling it two years later with the release of Sam’s Town. In the next section, we will look specifically at how Spaceman reflects Flowers’ efforts to grow artistically. In doing so, we will also cover how it positions Flowers’ faith as the part of his past that is the central and lasting catalyst.
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Upon a first, second or, in my case, a 1,000th listen, Spaceman and its alien abduction imagery can feel inscrutable. Yet when viewed in the context of Flowers’ life and its impact on The Killers’ music, it becomes clearer and obviously autobiographical. Take the song’s initial lines. The musician sings about getting ripped from bed and feeling excited to leave his “star-crossed world behind.” His positivity quickly evaporates after he is “cut open” and notices “bombs and satellites” strewn across his path. Having this realization is, as the song puts it, a “turning point,” a “lonely night.” When viewed collectively, these lyrics symbolize how Flowers’ initial zeal for the music industry, not to mention the stratospheric success he and his band experienced, quickly gave way to discomfort and reappraisal.
The set design and costuming seen within Spaceman‘s promotional music video complements this theme and furthers its autobiographical dimensions. The video’s setting is a multi-tier, open-air tower filled with people dressed in outrageous costumes and partying amidst chandeliers and candelabras. Topping the tower and looming over this scene of frivolity is a giant horned skull. Without a doubt, these elements turn the tower into a symbol for Vegas and its nightlife, particularly the mold of the devil-like skull – basically a stand-in for the “sin” part of its “Sin City” moniker.
After Flowers struts onto this setting and climbs onto the tower to join its inhabitants, what occurs next is similarly transparent about his life story. To put it simply, he is utterly ignored, and he even spends a good chunk of time during the video sitting alone at a deserted table on one of the tower’s platforms. The message here is like what was conveyed in his LDS hostage vid…, uh, I mean promotional video. While Flowers may have entered the Las Vegas music scene with bravado and was even embraced materially, he could never fully acclimate himself.
Just like in life, Spaceman shows that its author’s love for his past is what helped him break away from such circumstances. Spaceman primarily visualizes this by symbolically evoking the faith Flowers was indoctrinated into as a boy. Zeroing in on this aspect of his past and positioning it as perhaps the most salient driver behind his musical evolution is not accidental. It aligns snugly with what he says in his LDS promo – that is, the main reason Flowers found himself incompatible with the music industry is due to going to church with his mother when he was young.
The part of the song that depicts this specifically begins at roughly the 3-minute marker. At that moment, Flowers is suddenly shown on the very top of the tower structure. While standing there, he looks at the endless beyond of the night sky. At the same time, we see that the party people who had been occupying the tower’s lower tiers have disappeared.
Flowers staring wistfully into the sky evokes the heavens and the central role spiritually plays in his life. He then emphasizes the moment’s religious implications further by bowing his head at the end of this scene. The imagery signifies that Flowers has literally transcended out of what he sees as the sinful mire of the music industry. The disappearance of the other tower inhabitants suggests his faith has altered his perspective so strongly that his industry concerns are now totally off his radar.
The music video’s final shot carries this theme to its logical conclusion. An aerial shot clearly taken from a helicopter of some sort, the image shows an incredibly dark landscape. The only visible light in the scene comes from the tower, which we see far below with its original inhabitants having now resumed their partying. What the shot communicates is fairly simple. Having reconnected with his past as represented by his faith, Flowers, and The Killers by extension, are now moving away from the culture that initially drew them in.
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A shot like this stands as a perfect summation of what The Killers chose to do during their career prior to the release of Spaceman. But it also communicates something about the course they would increasingly take going forward. In the years following Spaceman’s release, the band has rarely released music aligned with the aesthetics of Hot Fuss. Instead, the group has hewed increasingly closer to the themes, vibes and style first established with Sam’s Town – which, as we’ve seen, is simply another way of saying they have moved closer to the emblematic makeup of Brandon Flowers’ origin story.
The results of this have often been mixed. 2012’s Battle Born, for instance, was perhaps most accurately and charitably labeled by a Redditor as “dad rock in the desert,” while 2017’s Wonderful, Wonderful was called the equivalent of creative anemia. On the other hand, The Killers would roar back to life with the one-two punch of Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine in 2020 and 2021 respectively, with the latter being acclaimed for its soulful focus on Flowers’ hometown of Nephi, Utah.
Spaceman, then, to its credit, can be seen as the intersection of the group’s past and future. It thematically synthesizes the dynamics that had been percolating at the core of the band’s identity. It also presages how they would work through these dynamics and refine their approach going forward. And eventually, it paid off. The public and critics would come to see them just as much as heartland rockers as wanna-be successors of groups like The Smiths.
But of course, all of this was still to come when Spaceman was released. At the time, Flowers’ insistence on chasing his past was pushing the group into an ill-defined future. The final shot of the song’s music video certainly conveys this. As the camera pans further and further away and the light from the tower becomes surrounded by walls of darkness, you get a sense of the band heading toward nothing but uncertainty. But for Brandon Flowers, at least, there was nothing uncertain about it. At long last, he was on the road toward home.
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1. https://www.spin.com/2009/02/spin-interview-brandon-flowers/
2. Ibid
3. https://www.nylon.com/articles/brandon-flowers-sams-town-interview
Adam Mohrbacher 