Let's Talk About Mr. Brightside
The first single off The Killers' debut album, Hot Fuss, continues to be everyone's favorite song to lose their minds to and capture what it means to feel alive.
“I’m coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine”
Only a song as magical (yes, magical) as “Mr. Brightside” could be so passionately, wildly sung in a local Killorgin, Ireland pub to memorialize a deceased friend and have the video footage of it warm the collective internet’s hearts.
Nearly two decades after its release, the enduring ubiquity of “Mr. Brightside” never diluted its undisputed ability to make everyone stop what they’re doing, lose themselves in the moment, and sing like it’s the last time they’ll ever have use of their vocal chords.
From the way its arpeggiated riff hooks you in and rings so sweetly in yours ears to the urgency that propels its vocal-eroding emotional release, “Mr. Brightside” perfectly captures the spirit of chasing the thrills of your life with your loved ones all around you.
By now, it’s probably stuck in your head.
Maybe, that’s it.
Or maybe it uncovers a never-ending film roll of memories and dopamine. Like the countless times you yelled — not sung — “I just can’t look. It’s killing me” in a crowded, sweaty bar with your wasted friends’ arms around your shoulders. Or the weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and other events where this song created a circle of strangers, best friends, and family members violently jumping without control of their limbs. Or maybe this song is bound to something deeper, more intricately personal.
Most songs, especially ones engineered to be a hit, lose their luster when they’re played to death. But everyone’s heard this song more times than they’d ever thought.
Its impact has barely waned since it was released 19 years ago. You’ll hear it in every cover band’s set and at any karaoke night. Brandon Flowers’ rallying vocals and that riff follow you to any establishment playing hits from the 1990s and 2000s. You may even find it still ranked on one of the world’s many music charts.
"But, she’s touching his chest, now//He takes off her dress, now//Let me go”
“Mr. Brightside” is about the lust and fiery excitement during our shadowy nights spent romancing others. It captures our sometimes reckless spontaneity and the willingness to let it all crash and burn for the sake of chasing bittersweet memories.
That’s not what it’s about at all, but the how and where we engage with it, over and over, is.
When we hear the song on the speakers, we look deeply into the eyes of those around us, point at them, sing to them, hug them, dance with them, jump in sync with them, and become one with them.
We stop wearing out hearts on our sleeves and let it bleed out in fully glory. This is who we really are when we’re not masking our selves in slacks and pantsuits or mindlessly doomscrolling through endless newsfeeds or spiking our blood pressure to win a political debate.
We’re here to live, and despite our baggage, we thrive off showing our excitement and affection.
That’s what we mean when we say “I’m Mr. Brightside.”
"But, it’s just the price I pay, destiny is calling me”
It’s easy to explain why we love “Mr. Brightside.” The melodies are infectious. The lyrics are both poetic and relatable. It’s fun and fairly easy to sing.
It’s weirdly difficult, though, to explain what’s made a song about the jealousy of a former lover a surefire way to uplift millions of strangers and bring them closer to everyone in the room. There’s no science to lay out what’s made this such an indelible and beloved piece of our culture for nearly two decades. Usually, with situations like these, you have to chalk it up lightning striking.
This was the first song the Killers ever wrote and recorded together. As Brandon Flowers, the lead singer, recounts during the 2009 Royal Albert Hall performance, the early seed of the song was even the first of five ideas on a tape that their guitarist handed to him when they first met. Now, imagine your first creation being on the most successful songs of the last 20 years, if not of all time.
That’s luck. That’s the forces of the universe clashing violently together like the atoms of the Large Hadron Collider, but creating art that transcends everything, gathers massive crowds to scream its lyrics back to the band, and turns the dullest of moments into a grand celebration.
“Open up my eager eyes, I’m Mr. Brightside”
At the same Royal Albert Hall performance, Brandon Flowers said the band members were five lost souls when they met. If you ask me, which no one did, that’s why it resonates with the masses so profoundly. We’re all lost souls, unsure of what’s next for us, creating an anxiety that’s always rumbling underneath our skin and waiting to explode. “Mr. Brightside” brings out the primal human in all of us, the one that needs to let all their inhibitions go and light their pent-up emotions on fire. We all feel it, which is why “Mr. Brightside” is at its most magical when it’s a collective experience. Nothing else matters when we’re tightly corralled with friends and strangers, giving our selves to wherever this song takes us.
For three minutes and 42 seconds, the world makes sense. We forget about the horrors of the world and the underlying tension of our personal lives. If only this feeling, these moments, could last forever.
But, time ticks on. “Mr. Brightside” won’t be on an endless loop. One day, all that brightness will go dark.
While we’re here, though, you’ll be damn sure that we’re going to celebrate life when that instantly recognizable melody begins like it’s the first time we heard it. And when we do die, all we can hope is that our loved ones gather one last time, in some shitty pub, happily regaling to every second of “Mr. Brightside” with their shirts off.
That, my friends, is why we believe in magic.