I Can Change

Over Ariel Rechtshaid's driving, uptempo production, this electro tune finds Brandon Flowers imploring a former lover that he can change to be the man she wants.

The song samples Bronski Beat's 1984 hit "Smalltown Boy." The band's lead singer, Jimmy Sommerville, told NME: "I received the demo to ask for my permission, listened to it and thought, 'Yeah, this is great, this man gets it. The vocal on there is almost like a cry.'" "Smalltown Boy was part of my political and sexual coming-of-age in the '80s," he continued. "The youth culture explosion in the '80s was intense - sexual politics, fashion, music, art, technology, heavy guitars combined with synths - and it was exported from the UK to the USA. If you were a kid at the time, like Brandon, it must have looked like the world was on fire."

This employs a cameo from Neil Tennant in the form of a spoken voicemail message. Flowers told Billboard magazine that getting the Pet Shop Boys frontman involved took a matter of seconds. "I'm a big Pet Shop Boys fan, and Ariel [Rechtshaid]'s a big Pet Shop Boys fan," explained the singer. "We just talked about it, and we just had this gap in a verse and we needed to stick something in there. We were talking about it being a speaking part, and the greatest musical 'speaker' is Neil Tennant! His voice is like no other." "I texted him if he would - he didn't even hear the song or the tempo or anything, I just texted him this line. I asked, 'Will you send us a voicemail of yourself saying, 'When you're looking for a change'?' And that was it," Flowers added. "He sent us a voice memo, and we stuck it onto the track, from the phone. It was done within 20 seconds."