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The Killers: “Quiet Town”

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Sep 19, 2021
Category: Rock

In 1994, 3,500 people lived in Nephi, Utah. The entire town occupied just 4.6 square miles. It’s 90% Mormon. Everybody knew everybody.

On November 8, 1994, JaNae Taylor and Raymond Leo Newton were at a grade crossing on their lunch break when their car was struck by a Union Pacific train. They’d been sweethearts since the eighth grade. They were parents of a five-month-old daughter. In June, when they were to graduate from high school, they planned to live and work and grow old in Nephi.

Brandon Flowers, born and raised in Nephi, was in the eighth grade when JaNae and Raymond died. A few years later, his family moved. All these years later he’s the lead singer and primary writer for The Killers, a band that is inexplicably more popular in England — “Pressure Machine,” its new CD, is its seventh straight #1 release there — than it is here. When the pandemic shrunk his world, he found himself thinking of his hometown and those deaths on the railroad tracks.

“I had seen one of them that morning. I didn’t go to grief counseling. They weren’t my best friends. I was surprised to find 25 years later how much I was still affected by it. I felt like it was the end of an innocence for me and for the town, because afterwards I noticed things started to happen. It was almost like opening this door of darkness.”

“Mentally, I started to go to this place where I grew up and write songs about it. It was as if there was a chamber of memories somewhere that was just waiting for me to unlock it. It was incredible. Once I finally opened that door, the songs that came out and the memories were pretty vivid and emotional. It became pretty obvious to me what this record was going to be.”

“I have a lot of nice and tender memories of Nephi. It’s no secret that I didn’t have a lot of struggle in my upbringing. My parents stayed together; they loved me and nurtured me. What I found was that the memories attached to sorrow, sadness and shock were really emotional for me. I was still walking around with them.”

“Since I’ve left Nephi, like much of America, opioids have left their ugly mark on the town, our friends and acquaintances. While a lot of these songs took place in the ’90s, we saw more overdose deaths in 2020 during the pandemic than any other year in recorded history. It’s affected my family and other people in the band’s families. It’s just a huge tragedy that America is facing.”

“Quiet Town” grabbed me the first time I heard it on WFUV. Like any great piece of writing, it explains nothing and tells everything. It starts with the specific event (the deaths), expands (the town), jumps ahead two decades (a new killer, opioids), doubles back to the unbreakable heart of the town (the Christian family), and finally, presents an ending I don’t fully understand.

The video blends music, animation and printed lyrics. It’s five minutes long. It seems longer only because you feel as if you’ve experienced a feature-length film about the big sky and unpopulated valleys of the West. And yet — and this is the key fact about this song — the little town of Nephi is just 80 miles from Salt Lake City. Vast and open land vs. an hour on the highway. For the people of Nephi, that’s literally the road not taken.

Let’s consider the lyrics as if the song is a poem.

Couple of kids got hit by a Union Pacific train
Carrying sheet metal and household appliances through the pouring rain
They were planning on getting married after graduation
Had a little baby girl, trouble came and shut it down
Things like that ain’t supposed to happen

In this quiet town
Families are tight
Good people, they still don’t deadbolt their doors at night
In this quiet town

1994 fades. Now it’s twenty years later, and the troubles of the world have invaded Nephi:

When we first heard opioid stories
They were always in whispering tones
Now banners of sorrow mark the front steps of childhood homes
Parents wept through daddy’s girl eulogies
And merit badge milestones with their daughters and sons
Laying there lifeless in their suits and gowns
Somebody’s been keepin’ secrets

Those last few lines — brutal. If I had to deliver a eulogy for a teenager, I’d be broken. You too, I’d bet. And yet the people of Nephi are redeemed. They’re believers, their faith is real:

In this quiet town
They know how to live
Good people who lean on Jesus, they’re quick to forgive
In this quiet town

Brandon Flowers loves his parents and what they represent: “A lot of times we talk about stagnation with snarky terms, and I think it’s one of the things that’s associated with towns like Nephi, but it can also be a beautiful thing, because it’s these people that are holding on to ideals and traditions. I hope that it never changes in that respect.”

Now whenever I’m near the town
I’ll find some reason to give
And I will walk with the dead and the living where I used to live
And every time I see my parents in the prime of their lives
Offering their son the kind of love he could never put down
Part of me is still that stainless kid, lucky

In this quiet town
Salt of the land
Hard-working people, if you’re in trouble they’ll lend you a hand
Here in this quiet town

Finally, the camera pulls back. In the final verse, we get a larger angle.

The first crop of hay is up
School let out and the sun beats down
Smoke billows from a Sunday train
That cries away from a quiet town

A “Sunday train” — that’s a train rolling across the valley on the Lord’s day — “cries away.” The ambiguity is haunting. “Cries?” Because it remembers? Because of the changes time has carved on towns like these? I don’t have a sharp answer.

Please watch the video. Yes, it’s five minutes. Consider it an investment in your quality of life.

Same song, recorded live. It’s so different when you see the singer, close up.

Even more remarkable, this live performance. Watch closely from 2:15.

The song is troubling for many reasons, but mostly for this. It begins with a man speaking generally about the railroad — from his remarks, it’s hard not to think he’s a railroad employee. This is what he says:

Oh yeah, oh, no, the train, the train
Every two or three years the train kill somebody
Every two or three years, yeah
Everybody knows about the train, okay?
You hear it constantly
You… I, I think the train is a way to find your way out of this life
If you get hit by it

Everybody knows about the train, the train reliably delivers death… am I the only one who thinks those kids might have orchestrated their deaths? That their tragedy, and the town’s, began with a suicide? If that’s the case, Brandon Flowers’ comment — “I felt like it was the end of an innocence for me and for the town, because afterwards I noticed things started to happen. It was almost like opening this door of darkness.” — has another layer of sadness, a sadness he can feel but, out of respect and uncertainty, can’t name.

Haunting, either way. And, either way, the most powerful song I’ve heard this year.

[To buy the MP3 of the CD from Amazon, click here. To buy the download of “Quiet Town,” click here.]