How many songs about young love and heartbreak am I going to find unbearably poignant? I don’t know. How many is Brandon Flowers planning to write? Desert cowboy in skinny jeans writes my life, a memoir.
Just over here filling in the gaps of my Killers collection with a Christmas CD or two, because I’m an oldster from the late 1900s.
Yesterday I learned that a new Killers album came out 41 whole entire days ago and nobody on the entire internet told me. Sometimes I don’t even know.
I suppose you could call me a Killers superfan. Not in a creepy stalker way. I don’t know all the band members’ names, and I probably wouldn’t even remember Brandon’s if his last name weren’t Flowers and he didn’t have side projects. I have a terrible brain for names and dates–of actors, band members, b-sides–so I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them as people, but I haven’t heard anything by the Killers that I don’t love.
I’ve found over the years that a lot of people get resentful when a band doesn’t sound the same on later albums. People get hooked on what a debut sounds and feels like, and I get it. I love debut albums: so many years of writing, refining, and feeling get concentrated into those first songs. Debut albums are gifts from the heart, and many of my all-time favorite albums are a band’s debut, a subject definitely worthy of more posts.
No matter how much I love a band’s sound, I eventually get tired of hearing more of the same. Therefore I love it when I find artists that can put out great sounds that defy categorization, where each album has its own vibe that isn’t bound to previous sounds. The Killers is one of those bands and I can’t get enough of how each album has its own internal coherence that doesn’t GAF about what came before or what people expect from them. (Sidebar: Jets to Brazil and Amy Ray both have this talent and I also adore them for it.) This new album is just the uplift I needed 6 months into a pandemic; sorry, not sorry if you can’t get past the fact that it’s not one hundred percent the new new wave electronica of their early days.
Besides my addiction to guitars and growly tenors, the thing I love most about the Killers is the strong impression that their experiences growing up in Nevada were very much like mine growing up in Indiana. Not since Live’s songs about York, PA, have I felt so much like a musician knows so well what it’s like to grow up among trailers, fields, meth heads, diners and roads to nowhere. These are the songs for those of us who did everything we could to leave where we were, and I’m always here for it.
If I don’t get out of this town, I just might be the one who finally burns it down.
This year took ten years to tell me that I’m alone again.
Almost exactly a year ago, my ribs began subluxating with a frequency that kept me from doing just about anything I wanted or needed to. Then my ankles and knees started going out from under me. I stopped being able to walk, do yoga, swim, write, type, sit, stand, lie down for any amount of time without pain. My migraines came back, my digestion stopped working right.
It began to seem that everything I did only led me further down a path toward immobility.
Everything here’s about to break / I’m one inch from more than I can take.
Coming to terms with chronic illness is exhausting and maddening. Quite literally maddening; not infrequently, I have feared for my sanity. During a year when I have needed my strength and capacity more than any I can remember in adulthood, I have had diminishing control and function.
Who am I if everything I was and did is stripped away by this illness? What am I if not this illness?
It’s beautiful and sad but it’s all that I have.
Radical social projects call us to move beyond that which we can imagine, imagination being limited in some fundamental way by experience and prior narrative. Our fantasies reflect the bounds of our reality and what we desperately require is a future truly unimaginable. What we need is to push ourselves to the bounds of what has been possible and step past into the unseen.
There is no path to where we are going, no backward return. Just the outer bounds of what we have known, and then something more.
Further north.