Originally posted March 10th, 2023.
Hot Fuss, the debut album by Las Vegas-based glamorous indie rock & roll band The KIllers, has three distinct themes: murder, being gay, and COMING OUT OF YOUR CAGE AND YOU’VE BEEN DOING JUST FINE GOTTA GOTTA BE DOWN BECAUSE YOU WANT IT ALL. But mostly murder and being gay. It’s basically the best album ever made, and I want to write about it so badly, but I don’t need to. This guy already nailed it.1
And then The Killers never made a gay, murderous concept album again… OR DID THEY? Okay, actually, I couldn’t detect any murder in this one (unless you want to assume that’s how Grandma Dixie met her end). So sorry. But it can be gay, and I’m gonna walk you through how.
Sam’s Town is set loosely in the band’s hometown of Las Vegas and the surrounding area. Its eleven tracks don’t tell a coherent story (as far as you know) beyond, “Hi! This is what it’s like around here! (It sucks!)” The album is named after a casino visible from bassist Mark Stoermer’s childhood bedroom, and was described to The Guardian by lead singer Brandon Flowers as a “spiritual autobiography.” That’s cool. I respect it. I’m going to do this, though.
Like the Hot Fuss gay murder narrative, the Sam’s Town lesbian coming out narrative centers around a love triangle; this time between two women and a man. We’ll call one of these women Sam. Her tiny hometown, which we’ll call Sam’s Town, serves as the setting. She’s not a Vegas casino owner, she’s just another girl. The man — the Visitor — is a prominent figure from her past, who drifts into the area one day by pure coincidence. The other woman is a peripheral figure from her past and present; someone Sam has known all her life, but paid little attention to. Until!
Once upon a time, in a massively clichéd attempt to find himself, a recent college graduate from USC or UCLA (just pick your favorite; I’m not wading into this) decides to take a gap year, gets into his car one morning, and starts driving aimlessly eastward. Eventually, he runs out of gas in the middle of the desert, just outside the titular town, where he is greeted warmly and entreated to stay for awhile by the locals.
Greeted warmly and entreated to stay for awhile by everyone but Sam, anyway. Hers is the only face he recognizes — a long-forgotten ex-girlfriend from his early college days — and she is less than thrilled to see him. They broke up when she had to drop out of school due to financial issues and ailing relatives and she’s been working thankless minimum wage jobs in her detested hometown ever since. Sam gives the Visitor a tour, bitterly expositing that her family has lived here for generations. For proof, she takes him to the cemetery to show him the plot where her grandmother, her parents, her brother, and the uncle who raised her are buried.
As this is the kind of small town where one person’s business is everyone’s business, the other townsfolk glean that Sam and this charming newcomer used to be an item. They work together to set them back up, and Sam isn’t opposed to the idea. At least in theory. In practice, she finds she can’t make herself feel anything for the Visitor, and she isn’t sure why. She does some soul-searching, hoping to determine what attracted her to him in the first place. She thinks it’s a mix of proximity, societal expectations, loneliness, and the fact that he wasn’t an outright asshole like the boys she grew up around. She did her time in Sunday School at the only church in town; she knows she’s supposed to be looking for a guy with Christlike sensibilities, whatever those are, and he’s the closest thing she’s found. He should be everything she could ever want. And yet…
Meanwhile, another local woman who’s been in love with Sam from afar for years, is heartbroken at the prospect of losing her to this rando. On a whim, she invites Sam to drive out to the coast with her for the weekend. Sam accepts, hoping that a vacation will help her clear her head and gain some perspective. And when they find themselves sharing a bottle of white wine on a secluded beach that’s… sort of what happens!
Sam returns, even more confused. In spite of herself, she can’t help gushing to the Visitor about how awesome it was to get out of town for once (though she specifically doesn’t mention what happened at the beach). The Visitor asks why she ever dropped out of school and came back in the first place, and she tells him she didn’t have a choice; she always knew she’d have to return at some point to take care of the uncle who raised her, whose addictions worsened in her absence. Though finally clean, he died fairly recently, leaving Sam with no real ties to the area. It occurs to her that she could escape if she really wanted to. The Visitor interprets this as Sam wanting to leave with him.
The Woman tells Sam that she wants to make their relationship official, and Sam is horrified. She’s been telling herself that what happened at the beach was strictly a drunken one-night stand, and she knows that the townsfolk probably won’t react well. An argument ensues — Sam insists that it will never work, and the Woman retorts that Sam worries too much.
The Visitor also asks Sam out, and she tells him he should probably leave and continue on his road trip of self-discovery. This town isn’t his personal hell the way it is hers, and he has no real reason to stay. He asks her to come with him, and she realizes that she’d rather suffer here with someone she might love than escape with someone she definitely doesn’t.
In the heat of the moment, Sam admits to herself and the Visitor that she is a lesbian. This upsets the Visitor, who has fallen back in love with her. He tries to change her mind, but she apologizes and tells him he’ll have to find someone else.
Heartbroken, the Visitor starts packing up his things and getting ready to leave, and Sam decides it’s finally time for her to do the same. She tries to psych herself up and gather the courage, even visiting the pastor at her old church for advice in the process.
The next morning, the Visitor drives off into the sunrise, and the townsfolk sing him on his way. Sam watches from afar. Once he’s gone, she puts her escape plan into motion. She tosses everything she owns into the back of her car, drives to the Woman’s house, and invites her to run away with her. The Woman agrees, throws some essentials in a suitcase, and gets into the car. With no fanfare, and no goodbyes, they drive out of the sunrise, toward the beach. Fin.
Wait. In 2016, for Sam’s Town’s tenth anniversary, The Killers released an unused track entitled “Peace of Mind”, which I like to interpret as an epilogue about Sam and her girlfriend traveling the world. Its inclusion isn’t totally necessary, but it’s a nice little song, and I did put it on the tie-in playlist. FIN.
So that’s lesbian Sam’s Town, the knowledge of which has burdened me for many years. Happy Women’s History month, thank you for reading my revisionist history of art by men! Tell me in the comments, what’s your favorite album to interpret sapphically? We all have one, right? It’s normal?
- Okay, I do disagree with a few points. Like, I prefer “Somebody Told Me” from Andy’s point of view, as he realizes he’s bi. “All These Things That I’ve Done” is a better closer than “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine.” Also, the narrator should dump Andy over the whole murder thing. He deserves better. I think he and the guy from “The Ballad of Michael Valentine” might have a lot to talk about. Let’s make this as convoluted as possible! ↩︎