Watch The Killers Perform ‘Land Of The Free’ On ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’
The song criticizes topical political issues including institutional racism and America’s gun violence.
The Killers performed their politically charged recent single, ‘Land of the Free,’ for the first time live in their Las Vegas, Nevada hometown during Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday, 1 April. Kimmel normally broadcasts from Los Angeles, but is shooting in Vegas this week. The Killers also delivered a live version of 2004’s Hot Fuss single, ‘All These Things That I’ve Done.’
For ‘Land Of The Free’s Kimmel debut, singer Brandon Flowers opened the song alone on piano before a choir chimed in with a repeated chorus of “land of the free” and the rest of the band joined in. The song criticizes topical political issues including institutional racism and America’s gun violence.
Towards the end of the performance, Flowers rose from the piano and took center stage to deliver a powerful a capella. “So how many daughters, tell me how many sons do we have to put in the ground before we just break down and face it?” he queries. “We’ve got a problem with guns.”
In January, The Killers released the Spike Lee-directed video for the song, which highlights the struggles and resiliency of real-life migrant families near the U.S./Mexican border.
Speaking about the track, frontman Brandon Flowers said on Beats 1’s Instagram page: “I think it’s a very important time right now and enough was enough was basically where it comes from.
“It started in my mind, around when [the] Sandy Hook [shooting] happened and as a father how that affected me and then it just started stacking up. It was things like Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, things like what’s happening at [the Mexico border] wall. This stuff didn’t seem to be in harmony with the values that I believe my country was founded on.”
Elsewhere in Killers news, the Las Vegas outfit are slated to perform at a number of festivals beginning this summer, including the U.K.’s Glastonbury in June, plus the Forecastle Festival in Louisville, Kentucky in July, Woodstock 50 in Watkins Glen, New York in August and Nashville, Tennessee’s Pilgrimage Festival in September.
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