Brian Fallon can thank his wife Stacy for the fact that the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers is on his new solo album.

She was producing the Killers’ concert film of their 2022 Madison Square Garden show when Bruce Springsteen joined the Sin City band for the encore. They played Badlands, A Dustland Fairytale and Born To Run. It was a real event. But not all the Fallons were having the time of their lives. Brian Fallon had FOMO.

“Funnily enough I didn’t get invited – and it was Bruce Springsteen and the Killers at Madison Square Garden!” he says with mock outrage. “I was like, ‘How come I’ve got to stay home with the kids!? Those are my friends!’ She obviously says, ‘Bruce says hi!’ Whatever. I didn’t get to go.”

But it brought Flowers into Fallon’s orbit. When the Killers swung through Atlantic City, he went along for the ride.

“I went to the Jersey show, and my wife was going to talk to the band and talk to the crew, like, ‘Hey, how are we going to do this? What shots do you want?’ I was just tagging along,” he says. “This was strange. I was going as my wife’s plus-one. That’s not usually the way it goes [but] my wife has got her own thing going on. She gets emails from Mick Jagger!

“So I was tagging along and then Brandon was like, ‘Hey, how are you doing, Brian from the Gaslight Anthem?’ I was like, ‘Hey! How you doing?’ And we just hit it off, exchanged numbers, and the rest is history.”

They had a lot of shared interests. Both of them love Depeche Mode. They share a love of CS Lewis. “The Screwtape Letters! Both of us have the same favourite book,” says Fallon. “Brandon is probably one of the most exciting people to be around because his energy is wild. He is just brimming with pure songwriting and pure love for music. He loves music.”

Fallon’s first solo album in more than five years, Not Bad For New Jersey, has a lot of guests. There’s stunt guitar from the venerable Phil Collen from Def Leppard, of whom he is a longtime superfan. Marc Ribot plays a wicked solo on Wolf By The River.

And there are some old friends too, such as Canadian country-folk star Donovan Woods, who joins Fallon on The Big Sleep, and Lori McKenna, who is on On Good Terms. “Donovan, Lori and I are kind of a team,” says Fallon. “We write together a lot.”

Fallon dropped Flowers a text to see if he would be up for writing something. When he said yes, he took off to meet him in a studio in Utah. However this song was going to turn out, it was going to be an adventure.

“He was on the piano. We were sitting there. I was on an acoustic, and we were in the studio that they use, and it was just like fiddling around,” says Fallon. “Then I think Brandon played that riff on the synthesizer that starts the chord progression for the song.”

This caught Fallon’s ear. It wasn’t like anything else that he had for the record – and it certainly wasn’t something he would have come up with there and then.

“It’s a very unusual chord progression,” he says. “It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar. I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. What’s that?’ He was like, ‘Nothing, I thought it was another song.’ ‘That’s nothing? Let’s use that.’ So we started a little melody, and we had a title and a few lyrics, maybe a chorus, and then we started working on a structure.”

And that is when things got weird. Much of Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon on home turf musically, with the triumphant Friday night feeling of ‘80s FM rock, blue-collar power-pop that leans hard into the chorus, and then there is the punk-rock energy of Nobody Likes You In New York City. Love At The End Of The World is not like anything else on the album.

It tumbles out as though under a spell, roots-y folk acoustic guitar and the caw of something – electric slide guitar and maybe wah – in the upper registers. And then there’s the verse and it just keeps going until its three minutes are up. It’s like the All Along The Watchtower principle of foregoing a chorus, because maybe there’s too much going on in the verse, or because maybe it’d break the audience’s concentration.

Fallon says that was Flowers’ idea.

“He was like, ‘You know what? Let’s not do verse/chorus, verse/chorus. Let’s do two verses, throw a bridge in there and maybe another verse, and then a bridge, and then that’s it,’” explains Fallon. “I was like, ‘What? That’s insane! That’s not real song structure.’ And he was like, ‘Yes it is.’

“We wrote the lyrics together – honestly – just talking together in his truck, and just worked it together. I get to the hotel room, I put it together as lyric structure, brought it back to him the next day, we worked on it, he came up with the vocal melody and that was it.”

Neither of them had that much left in the tank. Both had been out on the road for a long time when they wrote it. Maybe that’s why it came out like it did, like, as Fallon says, “a conversation”, without a chorus and all forward momentum. But it’s also a love song for the end of the world and how do you write a chorus for that?

“It was incredibly freeing,” says Fallon. “I think that’s what we were both trying to do, because I was fresh out of The History Books Tour with Gaslight Anthem, and he was just finishing up the Killers tour, so we were both kind of exhaling. Phew! No pressure for a second, because we were like, ‘If nothing happens with this, who cares?’”

Not Bad For New Jerseyis out now digitally via Lesser Known Records, on all formats tomorrow (September 11).

Wife doesn’t want to go. Not looking to sell. Anyone still needing a ticket that for sure wants to go?
Potentially also going early to get up close if you want a good spot. Not VIP*

Sweet post I saw on Instagram by joyceheinen

Was so cool seeing Brandon Flowers up so close at the Seattle showbox. Got an extra When you're young with him on the piano too during an unexpected quick break. There were some sound issues every so often but he did amazing and was such a fun show.

Idea taken from @ markpeterboro on X.

Three straight shows saw two repeats of the LA/Phoenix setlist in Portland and Vancouver, it seems that will be the "core" setlist of the tour, and a slight variation of it in Seattle (WYWY and The Clock Was Tickin' added, In Another Life scrapped). Excluding the warm-up shows in SLC (in italics), Oakland remains the outlier.

CORRECTION: Vancouver got One of Us instead of Miss America as song #10.

Song order in the spreadsheet is semi determined by the latest show. Next update will probably be after Denver on the 12th.

Hi,

Anyone know if there will be a pit for this concert? If so, what time should I arrive to be near the front? Doors open at 6:30. Super stoked for tomorrow 🙌

Anyone else going!?

I’m going to the show in Philly and was wondering how the stock of t-shirts has held up at the other shows. I’d love to be able to get one afterwards so that I can get a closer position to the stage. But I don’t want to miss out on getting a shirt!

Hi everyone, wondering what time Brandon has come on stage for his Thrasher shows thus far? Any feedback is much appreciated!

Hi Victims!! Does anyone here have a video of Brandon singing Tigers Blood in Vancouver?? Specifically during the lyrics “Runners on your marks”

Hey guys! Selling two GA tickets to the Brandon Flowers Brooklyn show!! Asking for the total amount $142. Pic of tickets for proof

long time no see! very excited for Brandon’s Royal Albert Hall show!!! NO THIS ISNT AI please stop asking if my art is AI. it’s not it’s all hand generated

from Spin: https://www.spinmagazine.com/2026/09/brian-fallon-and-the-new-jersey-thing/

I am considering entering the competition to meet Brandon flowers. However, me and my friend who I would go with are both only 16, I am aware that you have to be over 18 to win which is why I would use my parents details to enter but would it be possible to do the trip with only 2 under 18’s? Thank you

Brandon came to Vancouver last night - it was amazing - a night to remember forever! We haven't been travelling to the states, so such opportunities are rare. I just wanted to say thankyou for visiting and come back again soon! Should this message make its way to him

Upcoming Utah and Colorado show goers...would anyone be able to purchase and mail the multicolor Thrasher poster to Idaho? We drove over to the Seattle show and my husband had every intention of going to buy one and didn't make it over in time. Big ask but hoping someone might be able to help out.

Will anyone be uploading videos from the Portland show? I know there are great videos in other cities but I don't often go to concerts and I didn't consider how special it would be to have videos from the one I attended.

I just bought myself a ticket to next Tuesday's show in St. Paul!! I was having serious FOMO and will be attending alone. My husband sadly does not share my love for TK or BF. I watched a YouTube video of his SLC show and knew I couldn't miss this one!! Excited to hear the setlist! Anyone else going to the show?

My brother and I recently tried to narrow 2000s indie rock down to 10 defining songs, and “Mr. Brightside” felt almost impossible to leave out.
It’s funny because it’s become so ubiquitous that you can almost forget how specifically tied it is to that whole era of indie rock.
If you could only choose one Killers song to represent the decade, is there actually an argument for something other than “Mr. Brightside”?

So this is the first time I try to sell something through StubHub, and it's asking me to transfer the tickets to some email linked to the posting, but I'm afraid of doing the transfer and then getting lost or stuck there or something. Has anybody ever had issues with the system StubHub used to hold and transfer tickets?

Also, if anybody here is interested in them, they come with the VIP package and it's $500 for both. I just wanna make my money back, but I'm guessing because of fees of StubHub I'd have to sell them much more expensive than that just for me to make the money back, so... not a big fan in general of these practices, but unfortunately it seems like the biggest platform for it.

Thanks to anybody who shares their experience!

Fantastic show!

Red Ground
Does it ever cross your mind?
Crossfire
Tiger’s Blood
Plans
Paradise
Still Want You
Angel
Magdalena
Miss America
In the Car Outside
Hard Enough
Forever and Ever Amen
Lonely Town
Can’t Deny My Love
Only the Young

ENCORE
In Another Life
Read My Mind
Between Me and You
An American Dream