With "Thrasher," Brandon Flowers returns home

The year was 2002, in Henderson, Nevada, and no one at the bar that night realized they were watching what would become one of the biggest bands in the world: The Killers.No one, that is, except maybe Brandon Flowers, who was barely 23 years old when The Killers shot to stardom with their first single, "Mr.

Brightside," a story about being cheated on ripped from Flowers' own life, which became the anthem for a generation."I noticed early on, people would talk about the storytelling in Killers music, that they didn't always associate with young rock bands," Flowers said."And I think that was when it first started to maybe dawn on me, where was I getting this from?" Where he was getting it from turns out is Nephi, Utah, an hour and a half south of Salt Lake.

It has one stoplight, and feels about as far away from rock & roll stardom as you could get.The family moved there from Las Vegas when Flowers was eight.

"It's funny to look at it now, to say it was a culture shock," he said."It really was, even though I was just a kid.

My unit was my family, but there was something in me that still really felt planted in Las Vegas, and felt like that was part of my identity, you know? And it was something that I always wanted to go back to."Flowers struggled to fit in, missing school to help his dad work on an apartment building, a family business.(His sister's name is still on the mailbox.) And to buy music in Nephi back then, he headed to the closest thing Nephi had to a record store: The Flying J Truck Stop.

"They used to have these bins inside our Flying J that would just be full of cassettes, and you'd kind of mine through them," he said."One particular treasure that I found was a Depeche Mode record there."Another formative location in town? The local golf course.

"This is the bar of the town," said Flowers."This is where people can congregate and play a sport they love, but they can also drink.

And so, there's sort of a subculture of guys that played...