You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

The killers formed in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2001.

Since then, they've released five records.

Their newest album, Wonderful Wonderful, came out in September 2017.

In this episode, singer Brandon Flowers and drummer Roni Venucci break down the song, Rutt, from that album.

But the story of this killer song began when Brandon Flowers was on tour on his own with a solo album.

My name is Brandon Flowers. I'm the singer for the killers.

I made a solo record, 2014. It's called Desire to Effect.

And when we were going around, I had this idea to have a song that wasn't on the record that was like an introduction to the show.

It was based on this ascending core progression.

And I would just talk about little pieces that I was familiar with with each city.

And it was kind of like breaking the ice with the crowd.

And so in the middle of us searching for where we're going for this killer's record, I just started messing around with that on the piano.

And wrote another song over it.

And that ended up becoming Rutt.

We got an upright in the family room for my kids.

And I found myself writing on that.

It never stops that progression.

It gets knocked back down to that C-sharp every round.

And it just keeps going on the same cycle through the whole song.

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