The Conversation That Inspired “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers

The Killers’ 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, has one great track after another. And that includes “All These Things That I’ve Done”, its third single.

Musically, the song was inspired by a combination of artists. Flowers has said the bass comes from David Bowie’s “Slow Burn”. Meanwhile, its gospel elements were inspired by U2’s albums Joshua Tree and All That You Can’t Leave Behind. In the chorus, Flowers imitates Lou Reed’s vocal delivery. The song also features vocals from gospel choir The Sweet Inspirations.

The Conversation

Flowers wrote “All These Things That I’ve Done” after a conversation with Matt Pinfield, then vice president of A&R at Columbia Records. The convo was about his work with the US Army in a program that mentored soldiers who had been injured and diagnosed with PTSD returning from the war in Iraq.

After Pinfield watched the band rehearse in drummer Ronnie Vannucci’s garage, Flowers offered to drive him back to his hotel. And instead, the two ended up chatting in the hotel bar.

“So, he went home that night, and their old manager, Braden Merrick, calls me on the phone, and goes, ‘Hey Matt, Brandon wrote a song about you. He went home last night and wrote this song,’” Pinfield once explained. “It was ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ and the line ‘I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier’ is about the mentoring thing.”

But the line is often misunderstood, which has frustrated Flowers.

“Some people act like that line is nonsense, and I just don’t understand that,” he once told Rolling Stone. “If you listen to the song, it makes perfect sense.”

The song also deals with Flowers’ attempts to reconcile his Mormon faith with the world of rock music and the fact that “you’re not always going to be perfect.”

“For me, it was more of a religious thing,” he told The Observer in 2006. “Going through this phase in my life of believing what I believe and being thrown to the dogs, to the rock ‘n’ roll world… because even when I slipped, I still believed what I believe.”

Pinfield later borrowed the song’s title for his memoir.

Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns