The Killers: Lightning Field of Love
A couple years ago I shared in this space “The Killers: Songs for a Future Widower.” Last year’s album added another for that category, “Lightning Fields.” This one could be taken as a fulfilling, decade-later follow-up to “Goodnight, Travel Well.” It also connects with Battle Born’s “Heart of a Girl.”
Working in the rock music genre as he does, Brandon Flowers’ lyrics, especially those since Battle Born, generally revolve around a man in love with a woman. For a religion whose pinnacle ordinance is sealing a husband and wife eternally in a temple of the Lord, that genre requirement is not so limiting as it might appear at first glance as a mode for expressing a desire for holy things. “Heart of a Girl” was a very interesting song. First off, it is doing some permutation of the Kingsfold tune formalized by Ralph Vaughn Williams’ arrangement which we use for “If You Could High to Kolob.” This led me to anticipate some of the lyrical turns on my first listening. So, this tweaked hymn tune was put in service of a standard “boy is smitten by girl” song: “She wrote her number down / She gave it to me / They had to scrape me off the floor.” Then that time-worn formula morphs into something much bigger. “We’ve been trying to hear that ancient refrain / It’s the one that knows us when our heads are down / It reminds us of the place from where we came.” It builds up to the singer sharing his testimony “I believe that we never have to be alone,” and as I said I anticipated the next lines because I already knew the tune: “There is no end / There is no end.” This isn’t just never-ending romance. “Deep in the night, I feel a presence / Of something that was long ago told to me / There is a hand guiding the river / The river to wide open sea.”
Familiarity with “Heart of a Girl” will lead the listener to hear echoes of it in “Lightning Fields.” For those who like the Killers, this song also returns to that fun “What does that even mean?” quality of many earlier songs. Lightning what of what? I can’t really say altogether, but it works; it works real well. Flowers said that he didn’t tell the female vocalist that she represents his dead mother; he thought that would be too awkward to explain. Driving along with this track playing I pretty much never get through it without some tears forming, sometimes altogether overcome with emotion. It makes being a widower feel pretty romantic. For those who don’t need it now, store it up.
I just wanted to run my fastest and
Stand beside you in the lightning field of love
Press your face to mine
Name and raise again
Take the car out for a drive
(Take me with you to the other side)
SPOTIFY LINKS
“Goodnight, Travel Well”
“Heart of a Girl”
“Lightning Fields”
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
G.
August 3, 2021
Romantic theology
John Mansfield
August 3, 2021
“Romantic theology”
Yes. Listening again to the songs on Imploding I gave attention to who “you” is. The default configuration is that “you” is the woman the singer loves, but sometimes it is all of humanity listening to the song, a very plural you, and sometimes it is God. The lyrics leap between those “you”s at will. The aspired oneness of Zion, marriage, or reconciliation with God and exaltation in His heaven gets all combined. Romantic love is expanded beyond its initial impulses, and communion with God seems more comprehensible.
John Mansfield
August 3, 2021
For example, “Running Towards a Place” starts out:
Communal, then conjugal. The shift come with “lay with you in love,” which in a rock song we expect we know how to interpret. And yet . . .
“When we lie down we contemplate how we may rise in the morning; and it is pleasing for friends to lie down together, locked in the arms of love, to sleep and wake in each other’s embrace and renew their conversation. [ . . . ] So plain was the vision, that I actually saw men, before they had ascended from the tomb, as though they were getting up slowly. They took each other by the hand and said to each other, ‘My father, my son, my mother, my daughter, my brother, my sister.’ And when the voice calls for the dead to arise, suppose I am laid by the side of my father, what would be the first joy of my heart? To meet my father, my mother, my brother, my sister; and when they are by my side, I embrace them and they me.”
Bookslinger
August 3, 2021
Lightning is the best analogy I can think of to the everlasting glorious burnings in which God dwells.
That “thing”, which Flowers describes as lightning, is perhaps another earnest/deposit/down-payment of what is to come.
I believe that the “filled with fire and the Holy Ghost”, as spoken of in scripture, is another thing of the same category.
Bookslinger
August 3, 2021
Oops… Main sequence stars would be better analogies to God’s glory, but until we create sustained fusion reactions on Earth, then lightening might be the closest terrestrial comparison.
Ben Pratt
August 3, 2021
The cover art for Imploding the Mirage is very striking, and looks like something that could have been painted by William Arkle had he lived in the American West.
Bookslinger
August 3, 2021
Ben, GMTA. I also get a 1930’s Art Deco feel from it.
John Mansfield
August 3, 2021
Wondering who William Arkle is led me to our friend Bruce Charlton’s blog where in 2014 he wrote about Arkle’s paintings of the Father and the Mother.
Imploding‘s album art is by Thomas Blackshear, and he titled the cover Dance of the Wind and Storm.
Ben Pratt
August 3, 2021
Bruce introduced me to Arkle. Wonderful stuff!