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I love Brandon Flowers. Talent, beauty, charisma don’t always meet, but it’s nice when it happens with a rock star.
I have a kind of patriotism that’s not pugilistic or xenophobic. It’s pride. Pride of uniqueness. Of the very particular. Of the colloquial. Pride of place.
I’m proud of America’s cultural history. It’s beautiful and epic, good and bad. I love what we’ve produced. Levi’s jeans, Buddy Holly, Billie Holiday, Mark Twain, William Burroughs (the good, the bad and the ugly), speaking of which Clint Eastwood, not to mention Marvin Gaye and Excene Cervenka.
I like words like chaw and traditions like sweet tea on the porch and BBQ in the backyard, In ‘N Out burgers and fries heaped in a cardboard box and movies in the park.
I come from California, the land of missions and the ocean and of graffiti and gangs and beautiful buildings like the Los Angeles Library and the Griffith Observatory. It’s really the American Parthenon, or one of them, right? It’s a place of Chinatown and Olvera Street, Taco Nazo in Baldwin Park and Manny’s El Loco in Covina, a Mexican restaurant as good as any in the world that recently closed after 49 years, shuttered by the pandemic lockdown. It’s a place where everything grows just fine side-by-side, cactus and bougainvillea, citrus and avocado, magnolias and Jacaranda trees and Elm trees.
And then there’s the American West at large, where I now live among the red rocks of Utah. Such sweaty and dusty glamor. There’s cowboys and Indians, and yes, the latter got the raw end of the deal. There are saloons with swinging doors and Victorian pianos, prostitutes and preachers. Some of those prostitutes were victims of sexual trafficking, and some of those preachers were charlatans.
Then flash forward to the conflagration of lights that is Las Vegas.
I know, I digress at length, because I’m on a roll. But my point is that Brandon Flowers, Mormon, raised in Vegas, raised on rock ‘n roll is, to crib from a writer friend of mine, Neil Nisperos (I gotta give credit where credit is due), intrinsically American and irretrievably western.
I love the Killers and I don’t care who knows it. I’m giving into my obsessions lately, with music, words, people. Because times are tough now, or maybe they always are.
As I once quipped in one of my epigrams, when the going gets tough, “If you’re feeling depressed, fangirl harder.”
I’ve just got the day off and am listening to music and catching up on songs by the Killers. And wow. That Brandon Flowers and his epic lyrics and melodies. Like William Shakespeare carrying a stick of dynamite.
–Sarah Torribio
Listen to more songs of the day HERE
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