Brandon Flowers (The Killers)

We all know the story, fittingly mythological: a Mormon raised in the seedy glimmer of casinos, destined for rock ‘n’ roll stardom as lead singer of The Killers.

But before that, Flowers was a teenager in small-town Utah, taken with the new wave and post-punk and Britpop his brother had shown him, yet spending just as much time driving the countryside with his dad and hearing Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings songs reflect his surroundings back at him.

Those seemingly disparate influences have converged in Flowers’ music for twenty years, but he only rarely wrote about that chapter of his life. As he entered his forties, he began reflecting not only on the whirlwind of his adulthood as a rockstar, but also on his formative years in Utah.

Ideas swirled, then arrived in the form of the music that first taught him about storytelling. They culminated in Flowers’ third solo album Thrasher, the most personal collection of songs he’s ever written.

Though Americana and Western stylings have often mingled with the alternative traditions in The Killers’ DNA as far back as their 2006 sophomore outing Sam’s Town all the way on to Pressure Machine, Flowers found that he’d tapped a new, rich vein of his songwriting: “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found my way back to my father’s music — ‘Country-Western’ — and discovered that the stories I carry really feel most at home in the skin of this beautiful American tradition.”

It was only an idiosyncratically and eternally American form that allowed Flowers to find the grain and gravity he needed. He wrote honky-tonk ragers, highway rambles, and winsome ballads, all lived-in and organic. Much of Thrasher features songs written in persona thinly veiling stories about Flowers’ friends and family from his teenage years until now, from Vegas to Nephi and back again, all rendered with the balance of sadness and humor inherent to country music.