The Killers' frontman Brandon Flowers recently joined the Kyle Meredith With... podcast to discuss the band’s upcoming 'Best-Of' collection Rebel Diamonds, and what their song selection process is like after 20 years.
LISTEN NOW: Kyle Meredith With... | Brandon Flowers
The Killers' single, "Your Side of Town," Flowers says, is a nod to the music he grew up listening to during his teenage years -- "equal parts" New Order, Pet Shop Boys, and Depeche Mode he told us earlier this year, but somehow "all Killers." There's also plenty more unreleased songs that still haven't seen the light of day yet, he explained, after semi-abandoning their latest album plans halfway through.
Related
Expanding on that topic, Brandon says "The label and we agree it's an appropriate time to put out a 'Best-Of' -- it's 20 songs for 20 years -- and it was going to conflict with this EP. So, I think it just made sense, because you're still gonna get a few songs that were gonna go on the EP onto this release that's coming. There will be no tug of war between these two releases."
"We have so many songs that fall by the wayside," Flowers continues, as he looks back on the vault of unreleased songs the band has collected over the years. "We try not to get too precious about them," he says. "There may be a couple that you don't hear, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. There's so much stuff... I'm sure if we went through it we might kick ourselves maybe over two or three of them that we didn't quite finish... but overall I think we're pretty consistent about choosing the right songs for the records."
"We did do a 'Best-Of' about ten years ago... we took that into consideration," Brandon says, before detailing what fans can expect on their next chapter. "We wanted to make sure that we got a couple of songs on there from our COVID records (Imploding The Mirage and Pressure Machine), some of our strongest writing... Five or six from those two albums on there, and then these new songs. There's a song that I don't believe was on our first 'Best-of' called 'Be Still' -- sort of a dark horse of a Killers song. It's just resonated with so many people over the years, and it's even grown in my heart over the years. We didn't put 'Jenny Was a Friend of Mine' -- we got to play around a little bit."
Also during their chat, Flowers discusses what attracts him to writing about the type of characters that populated last year’s Pressure Machine, the role of religion in his lyrics, and how he’s working on a record that might end up being a new solo album. We also hear how his musical North Stars have changed and about talking with Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder about Kenny Rogers.
Listen to the full episode with Brandon Flowers on Kyle Meredith With... -- now streaming on Audacy -- an interview series in which WFPK's Kyle Meredith speaks to a wide breadth of musicians, digging deep into the artist's work to find out how the music is made and where their journey is going.