Running Toward a Place
Brandon Flowers chases love and God in The Killers' album "Imploding the Mirage"
If you could see through the banner of the sun
Into eternity's eyes like a vision reaching down to you
Would you turn away?
What if it knew you by your name?
What kind of words would cut through
The clutter of the whirlwind of these days? - “My Own Soul’s Warning”
***
In August 2020, Bryan Rolli wrote for Forbes, “There’s a battle raging inside Brandon Flowers. For years, the Killers frontman has played dual lead roles: the boisterous, cocksure heartthrob at the helm of one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century, and the yearning, spiritual nomad with an eye toward eternity. ‘There’s sort of been a tug of war in my soul for my whole life with that,’ Flowers says over the phone from his home in Park City, Utah. ‘I think being raised a Mormon in Las Vegas had a lot to do with that.’”
Anyone who has listened to The Killers closely for any length of time can hear this struggle come up over and over in their music. But to me no album of theirs documents this spiritual struggle as much as their 2020 album Imploding the Mirage, in which Flowers seems to trace his escape out of the “mirage” of Vegas and into something real and beautiful and true. But like Dante is guided from the dark wood through hell, purgatory, and at last to heaven by the vision of his love Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, Flowers is guided by his wife as an icon of divine love leading home. Flowers has said in an article in Forbes, “Early on, a theme started to develop, and I started to see that I wanted the record to be about two people becoming one and two people becoming eternal”
Danielle Christensen also writes in LDS Living interviewing Flowers, “In Imploding the Mirage, the latest album by The Killers, Flowers noted that there is a theme of him being reconciled to God and growing closer to his wife, who had been struggling with PTSD as of result of experiences from her childhood. Flowers said the album artwork by Thomas Blackshear was a source of inspiration for the lyrics and music. The piece depicts a desert landscape with a man and a woman hovering in the air, their bodies seamlessly a part of the clouds.
“Some days I look at it and I see Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, and other days I look at it and I see the potential for me and my wife. And that was where a lot of content on the record sprouted from,” Flowers said. “I saw the correlation between that and for us becoming those two people on the cover of the album, and how it was all sort of intertwined . . . as our family unit and us getting to this place. And so the lyrics started to form.”
Flowers has been open about the fact that he left Las Vegas in 2017 for Park City, Utah because of his wife Tana, who had experienced struggles with mental health and CPTSD to the point that he called off the tour for his solo album The Desired Effect to be with her. As he explained to The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017, “‘It’s just that my wife just has to get out of Las Vegas. It’s nothing against this town, specifically, it’s just that her experience here with her family is the opposite of mine. You can get a lot from this city, but a lot of different things can happen in Las Vegas,’ Flowers says. ‘I came from a family where parents stayed together, and I say my upbringing was kind of a Rockwellian scene in the desert. Tana had the exact opposite, everything that you can kind of imagine, and I need to respect that, too.’”
But in “saving” his wife, it sounds like Flowers saved himself as well, as we’ll explore in the lyrics of Imploding the Mirage.
The albums’ opener “My Own Soul’s Warning” seems to find the singer in a dark place. Like Icarus, he’s tried to brave the skies and failed: “I tried going against my own soul's warning / But in the end, something just didn't feel right / Oh, I tried diving even though the sky was storming / I just wanted to get back to where you are / But man I thought I could fly / And when I hit the ground / It made a messed up sound and it kept on rattling through my days / Cutting up my nights like a goddamned knife / And it got me thinking no matter how far / That I just wanted to get back to where you are.”
Flowers seems to lend more insight into his state in the lyrics to “Imploding the Mirage” at the end of the album: “I was spellbound by the show / The matchless power of the glow / I was bound by golden shackles / Getting by / She tripped the breaker / Blew the fuse”
It sounds like he’s been seduced by the mirage, perhaps by the glitz and glamor of the rock star lifestyle, but this crisis has emerged and he’s realized how lost and how far away he is from anything that’s real.
“Blowback” and “Dying Breed” find Flowers reflecting on some of his wife’s story and whether he has what it takes to be there for her. She's ‘’sitting on a secret / She didn't ask for, no girl ever did / There's a whisper in her heartbeat / She can hear it just enough to keep her alive / But she's breathing in the blowback.”
Flowers ends the song by asking himself, “Can you cast out a demon? /Can you wrangle the wind? / Will you stay when she's breathing the blowback again?”
In “Dying Breed” there’s moments when Flowers sounds confident: “There's gonna be opposition / Ain't no way around it / But if you're looking for strong and steady / Well baby, you found it / We'll weather the coldest night / Baby, we're a dying breed”
And there are moments when he wonders, “I don't know what you want from me / Sometimes I don't know what to do / It's like I'm screaming in a dream / It's like I can't get through / What if we're not prepared for this? / What if we just can't find the trail? / Then I remember the promise I made / And the way that I fell / For the coveted touch of a girl in love”
In “Caution” the decision is made, “I'm throwing caution / What's it gonna be? / Tonight the winds of change are blowing wild and free / If I don't get out / Out of this town / I just might be the one who finally burns it down”
“Lightning Fields” starts out with dream imagery and symbolism of a man seeing a woman “dressed in white” and “standing in the lightning field of love”. Flowers has said this is about his father having a dream about his wife, Brandon’s mother, after she passed away of cancer in 2010. I’d like to think that Brandon is also thinking about his relationship with his own wife.
I just wanted to run my fastest and stand beside you
In the lightning field of love
I didn't want to wake up
I just wanted to run my fastest and
Stand beside you in the lightning field
Press your face to mine
Name and raise again
Take the car out for a drive
The song reaches a moment of transcendence when k.d. Lang, voicing the female characters says:
There's no end to love
There's no end to truth
There's no end to me
There's no end to you
The next song, “Fire in Bone” is basically a retelling of the story of the Prodigal Son, which I imagine has something to do with Brandon returning to where he grew up in Utah, but also returning to his faith. He’s said himself about the song, “When you get to that point of the son returning and the father seeing him and running out to meet him in the road and falling on his neck. . . . It just touches your heart, and I think we all see ourselves in the prodigal son. You know, we’re all beggars at some point. It’s just such a beautiful image.”
He puts it this way in the song:
When I came back empty-handed
You were waiting in the road
And you fell on my neck
And you took me back home
After all that I took from you
After all that I put you through
Here I am
“Running Toward a Place” starts with a prayer:
Give me the eyes that I may see
The good in my people and the trouble in me
Give me the hands that I may lift
The weight of another who's starting to drift
Give me a song that I may sing
That cuts like a canyon and rides on a wing
And give a heart that I may stand
For what I believe in
Then the chorus says,
And if we're running towards a place
Where we'll walk as one
Will the hardness of this life
Be overcome?
If I lay with you in love
Will you meet me there?
And shake the lightning from the locks
Of your unbound hair
Can two become one?
Here I see Flowers meditating on the overlapping symbolism of the love between him and his wife mirroring the union of humanity with God. He repeats this idea by then quoting the poetry of William Blake:
Can you see the world
In a grain of sand?
Can you find heaven in a wildflower
Hold it in the palm of your hand?
Blake is expressing the idea that creation is a window to the divine, that we see the greater in the lesser, heaven in a wildflower. Flowers has come to understand the power of divine love through his relationship with his wife.
We see this same idea reflected in the song “My God” where Flowers celebrates both his wife overcoming some of her challenges and, again, his own redemption found in surrendering control. “It’s like a weight has been lifted”
“When The Dreams Run Dry” finds Flowers in a place of peace, affirming to his wife:
When the dreams run dry
I will be where I always was
Standin' at your side
Letting go of the reins
We also see him continuing to press into God:
Reach for the summit
Of an ancient design
On the verge of eternal
On the heels of divine
The final song, “Imploding the Mirage” ties the whole album up in a bow. He recounts again the story of meeting his wife and the love that drew him to her:
I was a timid, Rockwellian boy
She was tattooed and ready to deploy
Gave me reservation and the like
For she could be the dangerous type
But I threw caution 'cause something about that
Yin and the yang was pushing my boundaries out
Beyond my imagining
He implodes the mirage, leaves the city for the desert.
Flowers ends the album with a beautiful inverted image of the opening lyrics. Where before he flew in the storm and crashed to earth, now it’s his wife’s turn to fly, “Her wing have come / and she’s ready for the sky”
I think he’s ready to join her, floating gracefully on the desert winds, man and woman together in the dance of love.
This essay was originally part of a Hutchmoot 2023 session.
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