Here, Brandon Flowers sings about the burden put on Americans to flourish and prosper. He told HMV: "I was thinking about American pressure and the American dream, that pressure to succeed and deliver, the pressure to win, how everything is compounded by religious pressure. It feels like a machine."
Flowers grew up in Henderson, just outside Las Vegas. When he was 8, he and his family moved to the rural Utah town of Nephi. During the second verse, he explores his gratitude for the way his parents raised him in Nephi. Keep the debt cloud off the kids Only sunshine on their lids Jiminy Cricket and Power Wheels And memories of Happy Meals Flowers told the UK newspaper The Sun the life he had in Nephi differed completely from if he'd stayed in Las Vegas. "It was free and like being in the '50s when I was there," he said. "The clichés about people not locking their doors were real. I look back at it with much more fondness now."
Flowers reflects on his stressful existence now and the way contemporary society forces his children to mature faster than he did. Why don't you say little things? Butterflies don't just dance on a string It feels like you clipped all their wings And every year goes by faster than the one before Flowers told Australia's Triple M Radio there's a sadness as a parent watching how quickly his children are growing up. "You start being evaluated when you're a kid, how you respond to pressure and sometimes you get marked unfairly at an early age because of the way that you respond, what your worth is."
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