Brandon Flowers releases solo album "Thrasher," a country turn toward his youth

The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers released his new solo album, Thrasher, taking what he calls a country and western approach built from stories of his childhood in Utah. Growing up, Flowers gravitated toward new wave acts like The Cars, New Order and the Smiths, the influences he built The Killers around, but he told NPR the deeper pull came from his father's classic country record collection, one he had barely tapped into until now.

"There's that famous Walt Whitman quote, I am large, I contain multitudes," Flowers said, describing how the new sound sits alongside his old band rather than replacing it.

Two songs draw on family directly. "One Of Us" is a tribute to a brother-in-law who married Flowers' sister when Flowers was six and later died suddenly; "Miss America" revisits an abusive relationship one of his other sisters escaped after the family moved from Las Vegas to Payson, Utah, in 1989, when Flowers was eight and his sister was around 22 with three young daughters. He said he wanted her approval before recording the song and showed it to her ahead of the sessions.

Flowers credited artists like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty with opening the door to writing this directly about his own life: "I used to think my experiences weren't interesting enough." He said he could not have made an album like Thrasher earlier in his career, echoing an idea Martin Scorsese has voiced about art, that "the most personal is the most creative."

Flowers said his 82-year-old father, who loves the record, had been "secretly been waiting for me to make this record all along." Thrasher is out now, joining the rest of the week's country arrivals on the release calendar.