#pics TK

[lonestardust]

Memories from TK's 30th Birthday 🖤

[cashmere-caveman]

apparently ive had this in my drafts long enough that trouba isnt even a ranger anymore so time to exorcise this

[starcrustduster]

[voyager-99]

Just a dump of a lot of my Sunshower (TC/Sunstreaker) art

Most likely OOC bc I just draw what I feel like, so don’t come to murder me

[hotfuss]

the killers in the times style 2005. Photos by Lee jenkins

[ghostfilecabinet]

i won't be convinced this candle wasn't made with shane and ryan in mind

[fent4ny1]

only a few hours until we finally get them back after an entire year of waiting !

[itspopcult]

[davidaltofsky]

Finally got to go back to the gym after a long work week, I think I'm showing a lot more improvements... though, I might need a certain medical professional to do a proper examination to confirm that ;)

[americanmasquerade]

read my mind more like uhhhhhhHHHH OH MY GOD BRANDON I LOVE YOU!!! (some more pics from the townsville 30/11/24 show!)

[duketod]

[significant-narratives]

no but really i wonder what it feels like to be in the nhl and lose the person you’d thought you’d be playing with forever. what are you supposed to do with all the stupid little things you know about them now. you memorized their coffee order and learned how to share a hundred hotel rooms with them and made a custom playlist for your ride into the rink in the mornings and now it’s all just supposed to get locked into a drawer somewhere never to be used again? you’re supposed to stop expecting them to be waiting for you around the corner, just out of reach? stop looking over your shoulder expecting them to be there? bury all your inside jokes and quietly kill all the hope you had for your shared future? watch from afar as they grow into someone else, until you blink and suddenly they’ve taken the shape of someone you don’t know? and then you spend the rest of your life haunted by a shadow of someone who doesn’t exist anymore except in your memories? what the fuck man.

[sweaty-betty]

cutie pie angel babies🥰🤗😫😭😩🥺

[-cassiopeia-]

Can you

not d i s a p p e a r

on me?

[rexila-rites]

I’ve gotta ask- if you have any, what songs do you associate with any of the characters from the Superthieves au (leaning more towards Stan and Narry but anyone is more than welcome to be include!)? I’m just curious! ^^

Ohhh man I have like a handful of playlists for them ranging from 'background instrumental for any given action scene' to 'playlist for this specific storyline' to 'playlist for this specific character' to 'playlist for this specific character at this specific part of the fic' hahaha! I'll pick a few though:

One Thing Left To Try - MGMT - Stanley and his friend I put this in Liner Notes, but it's I think a turning point song for Stanley and his friend in the office, that moment where his friend offers the help and Stanley takes it and they get out... and there's more to it than that, but I'll have to get to it later in the volume 🤭

Bunny In A Bunny Suit - Frank Bango - Stanley immediately post-office, when he was still getting back on his feet in his newfound freedom.

Bunny In A Bunny Suit - Simone White - Mariella's playlist has a cover of a song on Stanley's playlist because aside from thinking I'm funny she's currently coming to terms with having the time and space to figure out who she wants to be, learning to be herself, and y'know, the parallels like they had in the end of Love Me Normally.

Mariella's got the most defined playlist, I think - Stanley's got his own but there's a couple of songs I could still take or leave hehe.

One more from her playlist but I think can be applied to everyone: Imposter Syndrome - Sidney Gish because while Mariella has the furthest to go to becoming a normal living person, all four of our main characters are struggling to various degrees of success of being normal functioning humans in society.

but hey! Back to Stanley and Narrator - Suburbia Overture (etc) - Will Wood is something I associate with Stanley whenever I'm writing bits of his time in the office or echoes of his backstory in the present!

Terrible Things Brick + Mortar - this is kind of a Stanley and Narrator song to me, more Stanley than Narrator, kind of comparison (But I, I'm just like you, I've got no name at all), also where the Terrible Things referred to are the deeply questionable and borderline self-destructive decisions either of them make on the job.

I actually don't have a lot of songs for Narrator specifically, he's a hard one to find the right vibes for and i'm shy about the ones I've kind of liked for him buT maybe that'll settle as I continue with Volume 2! I did pick out some songs I think he'd have liked from his friend's catalogue of britpunk in Liner Notes! I'm also shy about that, but I'll leave you with one song from it, while we're talking about Volume 2.

Likewise I don't have a playlist for Superthieves Stanley/Narrator yet, still feeling that one out, though I think Up To No Good by the Hoosiers might end up there...

Don't get too comfortable with the man who has no history

[hotfuss]

rolling stone france september 2021

edit: translation now available thanks to the wonderful @likemonstersinlove!

- INTERVIEW -

THE KILLERS

America afterwards

DEEP DIVE INTO THE KILLERS’ AMERICA

Pressure machine depicts the daily life of a small american town in a springsteenian style deftly taken on by their singer, Brandon Flowers. The band tell of their reunion with guitarist Dave Keuning and consider their return to the scene with prudence.

At the onset of the pandemic, when it became obvious that the Killers 2020 tour would not happen, Brandon Flowers started thinking back to his childhood spent in the small isolated town of Nephi, Utah. “There was a nostalgia in the air and a little bit of sadness too, " says the singer, "all those stories resurfaced as I was thinking back to the place where I was in the 90s.”

These “stories” make up the fertile ground for the Killers’ new opus, Pressure Machine, released August 13th, a concept album about life in Nephi told from the point of view of several of the town’s inhabitants, that broaches varied topics: [from] prescription drug abuse to poverty, by way of criminality, drugs, homophobia and depression. Despite the dark tone of the record, there are strokes of hope and joy sprinkled along the album.

“When I was writing these songs, I was thinking among other things of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or of John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of heaven, says Flowers, where multiple short stories all take place in the same setting. For some reason, I dared to try it myself. Once I realised they were going to take place here and they would be true stories, everything became obvious to us.”

Brandon Flowers wrote the lyrics before the music was composed, scattering pictures of Nephi around his [computer] keyboard to get inspiration. When they were ready, the band gathered in their studio in Cotati, California, with producers Jonathan Rado and Shawn Everett, 

|| “BRANDON FLOWERS WROTE THE LYRICS BEFORE THE MUSIC WAS COMPOSED, SCATTERING PICTURES OF NEPHI AROUND HIS KEYBOARD TO GET INSPIRATION.”||

the same team who worked on Imploding the Mirage the year prior. It was early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. “It was hard, says Flowers, Shawn has a penchant for hypochondria. He would wear glasses, a protective visor, and three masks in the studio. It was crazy. The bassist Marl [Stoermer] also had a hard time, and he could not get into the studio. But we would wear masks as well and get tested regularly. We were quite diligent.”

The album opens with “West Hills”, which tells the story of a desperate Nephi townie who gets arrested for “oxy” possession. “They got me for possession of them hillbilly heroin pills enough to kill the horses that run free in the west hills”, sings Flowers. The record turns even darker with “Terrible Thing”, which focuses on a gay teenager contemplating suicide. “There were kids I grew up with and only discovered years later that they were gay, recalls Flowers, it must have been so hard on them. I think the world is progressing in a more positive and more inclusive direction, but it was still the 90s and people would keep such things to themselves.”

Most of the songs are pulled from Flowers’ own memories in Nephi or things he read these past few years, but in “Desperate Things”, he chose to write the fictional story of a cop falling in love with a victim of domestic violence and ends up murdering her husband. It’s a story that would have easily found its place in Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and that is unlike any other song from the Killers’ repertoire.

“I chose a story that caused a scandal in town when I lived there, and I took a few liberties in the third verse to turn it into a murderous ballad, explains Flowers. In a typical pop or rock song, there are only two verses. It’s only when you start looking into Springsteen and [John] Prine, for example, that you find a third or fourth verse. But it only serves to flesh out a story.”

“In Another Life” and “In The Car Outside” linger over disappointed dreams and bitter regrets of middle age, but the album ends on a true hope with “The Getting By”. “But maybe it's the stuff it takes to get up in the morning and put another day in, son that holds you 'til the getting's good…”

The album includes appearances from Joe Pug, Sara Watkins and Phoebe Bridgers, and marks the return of the Killers guitarist Dave Keuning. He did not take part in Imploding the Mirage or the last tours because of personal problems and the exhaustion from the long years spent on the roads. He was not involved in the entire creative process, but “In The Car Outside” and “A Pressure Machine” both start off on his guitar lines, and he plays on other songs from the album. “It was cool that he came back, declares drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. You always realise what someone brings to the table the moment he comes into or out fo a room. It was nice to have his input again in the studio. We’ve been playing together for about 20 years. It felt good.”

They had almost finished recording when they decided to send an NPR employee to Nephi to record interviews with the inhabitants. He came back with incredibly personal stories, so lively that the band decided to open each song on the album with excerpts from those recordings. “We were right in the mastering phase, but to us, it was the last ingredient we needed to complete the project," says Vannucci. It gave us a better grounding in reality than our interpretations through songs and music… They were people with their accents and their stories. It’s what allowed us to put the project together and strengthen it.”

The band gave a virtual concert at the end of June for the Splendour in the Grass festival in Australia, with Keuning and Stoermer back on stage with the band for the first time in years, but they aren’t planning to launch an official tour before next March when they go to New Zealand. They will perform in North America in August 2022. But first, they performed on August 21st at the We Love NYC concert in Central Park, along with Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, LL Cool J, Elvis Costello and many others.

They will also be playing the Firefly Festival in Delaware on September 24th, and the Sandjam Music Festival in Florida at the beginning of October. For now, according to the band, Keuning is planning to join them on the road, but Stoermer will stay home. Tour bassist Jake Blanton will take his place again.

“We will play a trial concert in Terminal 5 [in New York] before the Central Park concert, " declares Flowers. We’ve had incredible concerts at Terminal 5. I cannot stop thinking about the song we’re gonna open the set with. I hope I’ll keep my cool. Playing live is a part of our identity and it’s something that we missed, this connection to the people of this community.”

Many bands are currently on the road, including Dave Matthews Band, Phish, and Green Day, but the Killers are being very careful by accepting no major concert as headline act before 2022. “We don’t want to be a band that spreads Covid or the K variant, " explains Vannucci. There are a lot of unknowns related to touring and questions of responsibility. And just out of respect for the people and so that everyone stays healthy, we wanted to remain prudent in that regard and not jump the gun too fast.”

Even if they will have two full albums filled with songs they have never played live when they get back on the road, they’re already considering another record. The band is at the very early stages of conception. “We had meetings for a week in San Diego notlong ago, at  Dave’s, says Flowers. We were together the four of us, it was the first time we were doing that in years. But we must rehearse in January for the tour. I don’t know if we’ll find the time [to finish another album], but we will certainly meet again before Christmas.”

In the meantime, Flowers is eager to share Pressure Machine with the world. And working on the album finally gave him the opportunity to see Nephi in a very different light. “When I was a teenager, I wanted to leave. It’s only way later that I developed a better understanding and another view of this town’s beauty. I was so free there. People didn’t even need to lock their doors. I had a different upbringing there. I can appreciate that now.”

captions:

page 4

GLITTER

On stage, Brandon likes to call to mind his hometown of Las Vegas, Sin City. And has great fun with it. Here at the Bonaroo festival in 2018.

page 6

MEMORY

The Killers spent the lockdown recording their new concept album.