nterview with Brandon Flowers

from MTVAsia.com

July 15,2005

What was the music scene like in Vegas?
It was pretty terrible. The music scene in Vegas is kind of in a drought. Dave always says that it resembles the area around the city, which is desert. Dirt. But there's just nothing happening.

Did the strip clubs play any influence in your music?
I don’t know. No.

Who are some of your influences?
My favorites are Morrissey, David Bowie, the Beatles of course John Lennon solo. I like the Cure, I like Frank Sinatra, I like Sinatra, I like the Cars, I like the Eagles. There's so much good music out there. We've got fifty years of rock and roll and some of it we need to listen to and learn from it.

What's your writing process like?
It's different every time. Every song is different. Sometimes it starts when we're in a room. Mark plays a bass line and we just go from there, or with "Mr. Brightside," Dave had the guitar part before I met him. Some songs I write in my bedroom so it's different every time, which I think is good cause some bands have one way of doing it and it usually runs out at one point and maybe that will happen with us, but I feel like since we have these different areas that we pull from that we're not going to get sick of the one way or the one person.

Do you write well on the road?
We're trying; this is our first album, and the first time that we've ever experienced all this so we have extra, extra long sound checks and we think we're good.

Who is Jenny?
Jenny is fictional. I always think of her as blonde. She can be whatever you want her to be.

How did you choose the name?
I wanted to use a name that was common.

Do people ever come up to you and say, "My name is Jenny!"
Yes, every day, which I guess is the whole point of it, so that's good.

What ARE all these things that you've done?
Grammatically I don’t think it's right. But it's about human relationship and it's a good thing to rely on someone. It's very human and it's good. Whether it's your brother or your mother or your dog or your God or whatever it is. "Somebody Told Me" was first "Brother to Brother". [starts singing] That's how it started before we had that hook or any music. I was running around saying "brother to brother..." and then we put music to it later.

What was your first rock star indulgence?
Jackets. I love Jackets. I got another one of those... I got another Jet liner one... black tux.

Are there any songs, while you're sitting on the tour bus, are there any "Tiny Dancer" like moments where everyone else is singing along to the same song. Sort of like Almost Famous?
My band ... we're not that close. I had more fun with Louis XIV at the piano the other night than I ever had with my band. We have more fun going to eat and stuff like that and going to movies where we don't have to talk so much. We all love the Commodores, Lionel Richie was in the Commodores, and my favorite Commodores song was post Lionel Richie, it's called "Nightshift" and we play that back there [in the back lounge of the tour bus] and it's beautiful. [Sings] "Talk to me so I can see what's going on."

So how did you first get into music?
When I was twelve, CDs were starting to get popular, and my brother, who was 13 years older than me, started buying CDs. And once he decided that he had enough of a collection -- 15 or whatever it was -- he gave me all of his cassettes that he had acquired over the last 15 years. So it was everything from Styx, all the Morrissey albums, all the Smiths albums, REM, Oingo Boingo, all of them, every Cure album, the Stones, the Eagles, all kinds of stuff. So I got all this music and that's when it kind of started I guess. Oh, and one XTC album, Skylarking.

What's been your favorite tour experience?
Tour? As in, being on the road? There's been a lot of great things that we've been allowed to do. None of us had ever been out of America until we signed the record deal and now we're going over seas. There's a cathedral in Cologne, Germany, and it's one of the most craziest things I've seen. Whenever we're in that town, which we've been to a lot, it's weird, we go to this cathedral and inside it they claim to have the ashes or bones of the Three Wise Men, or what's left in these huge gold boxes so it's kind of a cool thing to go in and see.

What's "Somebody Told Me" about?
I don't know. It's our fun song. It's our obvious song but really strong at the same time. There a lot of sexual energy in "Somebody Told Me," every night that we play it is a good thing.

What's "Mr. Brightside" about?
It's about the deep, dark, depths of the jealous mind. It's a dark place sometimes and that's what "Mr. Brightside" is about, and I think we captured that pretty well. I'm a jealous person, so I'm good at that, and I figured it out.

Was it hard to write a song like that?
Well, it's one of our true songs. Some of our songs are completely made up and some are real and "Mr. Brightside" was real so it came to me pretty easily.

What was it like recording that song, because in the recording it sounds like you're almost losing it at a point?
I try and sing, put all that I've got into a song.

Was it emotionally exhausting to relive that experience?
For the first few months that we played it out live, which we played a lot, it was probably a lot more punk and raw than it is now. So playing it, yes, I don't like to get all artsy, I have an issue with that, I've had an issue with that my whole life. So explaining it like that, like it was therapy ... it was just a good song and it's not ours anymore.

So what can we expect with the new album?
I just want to grow and get better and try and be as good as the Strokes. That's all that we do, that's what the first album was trying to do and that's what this one is going to do.