Brandon Flowers’s Pressure Machine
Illustration: Madeline Rupard, 2022
By Glen Nelson
To begin his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen describes the trinity of his early identity: the streets of Freehold, New Jersey, his home, and his church. Of his religion, he writes, “Over the years as a St. Rose student I had felt enough of Catholicism’s corporal and emotional strain. On my eighth-grade graduation day, I walked away from it all, finished, telling myself, ‘Never again.’ I was free, free, free at last…and I believed it…for quite a while. However, as I grew older, there were certain things about the way I thought, reacted, behaved. I came to ruefully and bemusedly understand that once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic. So I stopped kidding myself. I don’t often participate in my religion but I know somewhere…deep inside…I’m still on the team.” [Ellipses are Springsteen’s own.]
Songs by the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, are sprinkled with Catholic references. No deep digging required. Occasionally, these are direct, such as the appearance of Jesus in “If I Was the Priest,” or the refrain of “Saint in the City.” More often, the imagery of heaven, baptism, or characters from the Bible rise from Springsteen’s broad lexicon of American life, which includes religion. They are more than convenient allusions, however. The -ism of belief enters the writing process itself although it is harder to quantify. Describing how these things are manifest in his songwriting, he notes, “This was the world were I found the beginnings of my song. In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger and darkness that reflected my imagination and my inner self. I found a land of great and harsh beauty, of fantastic stories, of unimaginable punishment and infinite reward. It was a glorious and pathetic place I was either shaped for or fit right into. It has walked alongside me as a waking dream my whole life.” Finally, “I turned it into something I could grapple with, understand, something I could even find faith in. As funny as it sounds, I have a ‘personal’ relationship with Jesus….”
Brandon Flowers, frontman of The Killers—the band has 109 Grammy nominations and 32 wins and is widely considered one of the most successful rock bands today—has acknowledged his indebtedness to Springsteen, someone with whom he has performed recently, singing duets of each others’ songs. One of those was a new version of “A Dustland Fairytale” after The Boss texted Flowers to suggest the collaboration. The song had additional relevance to Flowers, as he told Rolling Stone in 2021, “‘Dustland’’s lineage leads straight to Bruce. When we finished it back in 2008, I sent him a copy and a note expressing my gratitude for his contribution to my life.” This kinship and artistic connection are even stronger in the band’s most recent album, Pressure Machine (2021, Island Records) but for new reasons.
After Covid delayed plans for The Killers’ 2020 concert tour to promote their sixth studio album, Imploding the Mirage (2020, Island Records), Flowers embarked on a project and writing process new to him, and he created a concept album by writing the lyrics as poems first and then composed them as something of a rock and roll song cycle. This became Pressure Machine, the band’s seventh studio album, which tells the stories of people from a single small town, based on true events from Nephi, Utah, where Flowers lived from boyhood until his junior year of high school. “When I was writing these songs, I was thinking of things like Sherwood Anderson’s book Winesburg, Ohio or that book Pastures of Heaven [by John Steinbeck],” Flowers says, “where it’s all these short stories that take place in this one setting. For some reason, I had the audacity to try it myself. Once I realized they were going to take place here and they were going to be true stories, everything just really fell in our laps.” For added authenticity, the band sent an NPR reporter to gather brief oral histories in Nephi, which are excerpted as introductions to the albums’ songs.
This creative approach connects to Springsteen’s Nebraska (1982, Columbia Records), a litany of down-on-their-luck, blue collar, Midwestern American stories, and the issues-filled The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995, Columbia Records). Flowers notes, “I attribute my discovery and absorption of his music with helping me become a more authentic writer,” he continues. “He helped me to see the extraordinary in everyday people and their lives. And in this case, it was my parents who were under the microscope. Their faith and doubts, their search for salvation in the desert. It sounds Biblical. It also sounds Springsteenian.”
The title of The Killers’ album is taken from a lyric from the penultimate song on the recording. Here is a verse, “Hope’ll set your eyes agleam/Like four feet dangling in the stream/The kingdom of God, it’s a pressure machine/Every step, gotta keep it clean”.
If Catholicism is an influence on Springsteen’s work, what about Flowers, who recorded a short video testimonial for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ “I’m a Mormon” media campaign in 2011? The word Mormon and the name of the Church are absent in the songs of Pressure Machine, and yet their existence is an omnipresent as oxygen. Anyone familiar with Latter-day Saint texts and teachings immediately will recognize them in these lyrics. The songs are populated by ordinary, small town characters, predominantly LDS, from a town settled by Mormon pioneers and named after its most recognized book of scripture. On the levels of both culture and language, the characters are steeped in Mormonism, which is not to say that they believe alike. The characters in these songs have inherited this religion and tradition and are trying to navigate their way in life with it, in spite of it, or parallel to it. In this instance, at least, Flowers is a contemporary Mormon troubadour.
“I was born right here in Zion, God’s own son/“ begins the song, “West Hills.” “His Holy Ghost stories and bloodshed never scared me none/While they bowed their heads on Sunday/I cut out through the hedges and fields/Where the light could place its hand on my head/In the west hills”. These voices reflect the real-life complexity of Mormonism today. Flowers’ characters are something like the Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, if they got stuck halfway to California, converted, and just stayed put in the Utah desert. The final track on the album is “The Getting By.” Here is its second verse: “You know I believe in the Son, I ain’t no backslider/But my people were told they’d prosper in this land/Still, I know some who’ve never seen the ocean/Or set one foot on a velvet bed of sand/But they’ve got their treasure laying way up high/Where there might be many mansions/But when I look up, all I see is sky”.
Artists speak generously of influence in their work. Flowers has noted authors, songwriters, and others who were significant in the creation of Pressure Machine. Springsteen himself credited Flannery O’Connor, noir novels, Bob Dylan, and more in his work. Dylan drew from the Beat Poets, Arthur Rimbaud, and others, and for a period of three years (1979-1981) after converting to evangelical Christianity, his songs directly reflected his zeal for the Bible. Regarding the use of religious belief as an adjective for an artist, any broad label is inherently defective because there is no such thing as a single, representative, fits-all version of a believer. Calling Springsteen a Catholic rocker does not feel any more complete than calling Flowers a Mormon one, even if both have spoken directly about their faith publicly. Still, O’Connor once said, “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic.” The greatest artists defy labels. That is not to say they have no influences. Looking at the values of an artist, which might include religious belief, gives an audience yet another angle to explore meaning in an artist’s work. This is not to be feared. It should expand, not limit, how we view art.
In mapping the genealogy of creative ideas, however, something additional is at work, and with Pressure Machine, it is on full display. Before inspiration strikes for artists of distinction, there is sometimes another element involved: permission. It is an awareness that your artistic hero has taken a bold step previously that gives you approval to travel new roads, as well—not to retrace their steps, but to venture into a foreboding terrain previously opened up to exploration and to be inspired by that. Pressure Machine, with its embrace of religious texts, traditions, and the character of a specific people—all made contemporary by a rocker on the global stage—is the result of one such trip.
The Killers’ Imploding the Mirage Tour continues with cities and dates in four countries, through December 19, 2022.