The album features guest appearance by Joe Pug, Sara Watkins, and Phoebe Bridgers, and it also marks the return of Killers guitarist Dave Keuning. “In Another Life” and “In the Car Outside” dwell on the dashed dreams and bitter regret of middle age, but the album ends with genuine hope on “The Getting By.” “Maybe it’s the stuff it takes to get up in the morning,” Flowers sings, “and put another day in sun that holds you till the getting’s good … This whole town is tied to the torso of God’s mysterious ways.” It’s not until you start getting into Springsteen and Prine and stuff that you get to a third or fourth verse. “In a typical pop or rock song, there’s just two verses. “I basically took a story that was a scandal in town when I had lived there, and I took some liberties in the third verse and turned it into a murder ballad,” says Flowers. It’s a tale that could have easily fit on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and it’s unlike anything in the Killers catalog. Most of the songs are drawn from Flowers’ own Nephi memories or things he’s read about in recent years, but on “Desperate Things” he veers off into a fictionalized tale of a cop who falls in love with a domestic-abuse victim, and winds up murdering her husband. I think the world is moving in a more positive direction and a more inclusive direction, but this was still in the Nineties and people kept this stuff close.” “There were kids I grew up with who I didn’t know until years later that they were gay,” says Flowers. The record somehow turn even darker on “Terrible Thing,” which centers on a gay teenager who’s contemplating suicide.
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“They got me for possession of enough to kill,” Flowers sings, “the horses that run free in the west hills.” The album begins with “West Hills,” which is about a desperate Nephi townie who gets busted with hillbilly heroin. But we also wore masks and we got tested regularly. Mark also struggled, and he didn’t make it into the studio. He was wearing glasses, goggles, and three masks in the studio. This was early 2020 and the pandemic was just beginning to rage.
Once he was ready, the band gathered at a studio in Cotati, California, with producers Jonathan Rado and Shawn Everett, the same team that worked on last year’s Imploding the Mirage. He wrote the lyrics before any of the music was created, scattering photos of Nephi around his keyboard for inspiration.