Brandon Flowers’ love of Bruce Springsteen is well documented. In fact, when his band, The Killers, released their second album, 2006’s Sam’s Town, critics noted the sonic similarities to The Boss’s classic 1975 LP, Born To Run.
After that, some sort of collaboration felt kind of inevitable, and it duly happened in 2009 at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands, where Flowers joined Springsteen and the E Street Band onstage to duet on Thunder Road, Born To Run’s opening track.
For Flowers, we’re guessing that this remains a career highlight, but even though Springsteen was one of his heroes, he still had to prove his knowledge of the song he was going to sing.
Speaking to The Standard, Flowers remembers what Springsteen did backstage in his dressing room before the show: “He put a piece of paper down and a pencil, and it was almost like, ‘how well do you know the song? Write out what you’re going to sing, what I’m gonna sing.’”
Fortunately, Flowers was able to rise to the challenge and demonstrate his Bruce-loving credentials. “I knew every word,” he says now. “We sang it together alone in his room, and that is about as close to heaven as you can get.”
Speaking of collaborations, Flowers also revealed that he was forced to raise his game when he recorded his new solo album, Thrasher, with a group of top-notch Nashville session musicians.
“I was humbled, because I went there feeling like I was hot shit, but I didn’t know how good these guys were,” he admits.
