This image, made for “Dustland,” shows Bruce Springsteen with The Killers’ Brandon Flowers.
At midnight on June 15, Bruce Springsteen and The Killers made their new collaboration — a pulse-pounding cover of The Killers’ 2009 single “A Dustland Fairytale,” retitled as, simply, “Dustland” — available on YouTube, Spotify and possibly other outlets. I have embedded it below.
They are expected to make a joint appearance today (June 16) on “The Today Show,” which airs on NBC television at 7 a.m. (UPDATE AT 9:10 A.M.: They debuted the official video on “The Today Show” and then made it available online, so I have replaced the music-only video with it, below.)
Simultaneously with the Spotify release, Brandon Flowers of The Killers posted a remarkable 566-word message on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. He wrote about late-February 2020, just around the time people were starting to learn about a possible pandemic. He remembered coming home early from a tour, because of that, and getting a text message from Springsteen saying, “Watching Glastonbury. You guys have become one hellacious live band my brother! Love the gold suit! We gotta do Dustland one day.”
He writes about the band’s 2020 album Imploding the Mirage, his parents Jean and Terry (whom he writes about in “A Dustland Fairytale”) and other subjects, but closes with some more thoughts on Springsteen:
Before I really became a fan of his, I was in the business of stadium-size everything. Larger than life EVERYTHING. Certainly larger than the lives of Jeannie and Terry Flowers. But Bruce has written a lot about people like my parents and found a whole lot of beauty in otherwise invisible people’s hopes and dreams. Their struggles, and their losses.
I’m grateful to him for opening this door for me. I’m grateful to my parents for their example to me. Now go find something new out about your dad, give your mom a big hug, and for god’s sake listen to Bruce Springsteen.
Springsteen first mentioned the single in a June 11 interview with SiriusXM satellite radio DJ Jim Rotolo.
In October, Flowers and Springsteen talked with each other on SiriusXM/Apple Music’s “Letter to You Radio With Bruce Springsteen” series. You can read an excerpt from that talk here.
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