A pilgrimage is a long journey, usually many years in the making, to a special place. They don’t have to be religious in nature but that’s probably what comes to a person’s mind when they hear the word. Music fans make pilgrimages. Whether to a festival like Woodstock or Coachella or to Broadway or the home of country music, we make pilgrimages. People’s reverence of the past is one of my favorite things about our human culture, and I especially love it when it comes to music heritage. I took a little pilgrimage to the crossroads in Mississippi last year and contemplated the sign commemorating the spot at this intersection where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil to master the guitar. Something big had happened there, true or not, and it meant enough to us that we put a sign up. Later on that trip I ended up at one of Johnson’s graves (we don’t know which is the true spot) which was located at a church cemetery in the middle of a crop field. Despite how far out of the way the location was, the grave was littered with guitar pics and alcohol bottles and bracelets. Blues and Robert Johnson meant something to enough people that they came all the way out to this church in the middle of nowhere to say thank you. That is religion.

I felt something in that cemetery and at the crossroads, but it probably wasn’t the same thing that the people who left the gifts felt. I thought it was beautiful, but I’ve never been a huge Blues fan. I respect it and appreciate the artistry, but it’s not for me. I wondered what it would be like to get to go to a place that meant so much to me despite having never visited. I wanted to make my pilgrimage. But to where?

The answer has always been Las Vegas.

If you know me at all, you know that I am a fan of The Killers. It’s a fact I am hesitant to mention because I’m so embarrassed by it, but it’s not hard to get out of me with the right questioning. I’ve loved this band basically my entire life—from the day I first heard All These Things That I’ve Done on the radio in 2005(?) to today. It will never end. I never want it to. The Killers are from Las Vegas, and that’s a fact they’ll make sure you never forget.

I’ve got a complicated history with The Killers and their touring schedule. Up until a few days ago, I had only seen them live in concert three times in ten years, two of those shows being festivals with “greatest hits” setlists. When I was 17, the fact that I had never seen my favorite band live was something I was majorly depressed about. I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way—when I think about that period of my life, most of what I can remember are the dark clouds that hung over my head. I listened to my favorite band to feel better, and then I felt worse because I remembered how I was the only one out of my friends to have never experienced their show. I know it sounds dramatic. 17 year-olds are dramatic. The Killers were all I had, and I didn’t even really have them. 17 year-old Katie’s feelings were valid and dramatic.

But then, in 2018, something beautiful happened to me. The Killers were going to headline Bonnaroo, and I was going to get to go. It took a lot of convincing to get my parents to agree but it was my dad who helped make it happen. My mother was worried about something happening to me and didn’t want me to go. She vetoed the entire thing. I got home from dinner with my parents (where I had failed to convince my mom) and didn’t even have it in me to go inside the house. I sat in our garage at my severely damaged piano and stared at the keys. It was February. It was cold.

I’ve told this story before so some of you might already know what happened next, but my dad leaned out the back door and told me, “You’re going to get to go. I’ll talk to her about it. She doesn’t understand what this means to you.”

Now, my dad and I don’t talk a lot about my interests. That’s just how we are. But he was there in 2005, driving me to school and watching me from the rear view mirror as I made up dance moves to All These Things, my first ever favorite song. So I got to go to make my pilgrimage to Bonnaroo that year and despite my passion for concert photography, I didn’t take a single photo from my spot on the barricade the entire night.

This isn’t about Bonnaroo, but I feel like it’s necessary information. I saw the band again a year later in Memphis at another festival and they played a semi-deep cut, Bling. The next day at a non-festival show in Arkansas, they played Sam’s Town and Change Your Mind. Still dramatic, 18-year old Katie was demoralized. She wanted deep cuts. I wouldn’t see The Killers again until 2022 at my first non-festival date. My collection of deep cuts got slightly larger, but it would be a long time before I caught up with my friends—if that ever happened at all.

I’ve been planning for the Hot Fuss 20th anniversary shows since I couldn’t go to Sam’s Town’s 10th in Vegas at 15 years old. A late bloomer in pretty much all aspects of my life, I didn’t get my first real job until after I graduated college in 2023. I knew I had a year to prepare myself for my trip to wherever it was happening even though I had no proof that it was happening at all. Everything I did, I did to manifest getting to go to this nonexistent show. I applied for a passport in November in case I had to go to England. I purchased my outfit for it at the beginning on January. On the whiteboard I used to keep track of my assignments on, I wrote “EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT” accompanied with drawings of the Hot Fuss buildings. I had to be there no matter what. Later that month, the shows were announced. Ten dates at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. My time had come. I warned my mom that my friends and I would be trying for tickets that week and that there was nothing that could stop me from doing this. Luckily for me, this time she was okay with it.

Back to the topic of pilgrimages, it is every Killers fan’s dream to go to Las Vegas. To see the neon signs and the desert and all the hotels and casinos. To stand on a random corner that most tourists would overlook and say, “This is where this happened. This is where that video was filmed.”

I remember in 2016, when I couldn’t go to the Sam’s Town anniversary show for obvious reasons, my friends went to Battle Born Studios (where the band recorded most of their material up to that point) and found that the concrete steps had been covered in graffiti—all fans saying thank you. People commemorating that they had finally made the trip. I don’t remember seeing graffiti there before this point, though it probably existed, and the number of out-of-towners visiting to celebrate Sam’s Town made the number of messages explode. Those messages have all been painted over now, but enough people come back that the place is perpetually tattooed. When helping other fans find the building, we tell them, “It’s the worst looking building on the lot. You can’t miss it.” This time, most of the messages were related to the Hot Fuss anniversary shows. When I approached the building, my heart clenched as I noticed painted rocks left in the windowsill and a single friendship bracelet hanging from the door handle.

It was the most surreal experience in the world to stand at those steps, permanent marker in hand, and contemplate what I wanted to say. I’d had years to prepare and suddenly realized that the content of my message had never crossed my mind. What could I say that hadn’t already been said before? I mustered up the courage to write out my message and then my friend Emma walked over, looked at it, and said, “Yeah, that’s basically what I wrote, too.” Ugh.

One of the most highly anticipated moments of our trip was when we finally got to go to Sam’s Town, which has a loaded history in The Killers’ lore. For me, Sam’s Town is about overcoming. Despite how the album was treated by critics in 2006, it’s a cult classic today and widely believed among fans to be the band’s best album—it overcame it’s original reception. The story of the album revolves around frontman Brandon Flowers escaping the town he lived in and returning home to Vegas and then proving that he was much more than any critic, personal or professional, thought he was. There’s another story that ties into this that I don’t often hear repeated, and it’s the reason why Sam’s Town was named the way it was. In a 2006 radio interview, a young woman asks Brandon, why Sam’s Town? His response was essentially that, while driving north on Boulder highway from his home in Henderson, NV to the center of Las Vegas, Sam’s Town was the first landmark that meant he was close. I remember him saying that seeing the Sam’s Town sign let him know that he was finally getting somewhere. Maybe you weren’t there yet, but you were close. I think everyone has something like that from their childhood. For me, it was a pair of caution lights on the highway that warned you of the stop sign you needed to turn at to get to my old house.

So there I was at Sam’s Town having finally overcome something. The fact that I had been able to finance the trip by myself and made the journey alone, the only help I’d needed being a ride to the airport. There was an air of sadness as I viewed the Sam’s Town Live! sign because while I may have been eight years late, I was there. You can start the show now, I’ve made it. Where should I line up? This was my crossroads. Something happened here, and I may have missed it, but I did make it eventually. I felt a sureness while I was at Sam’s Town that once I left those doors and headed back to the parking lot, I would be back one day. Vegas is a terribly overstimulating place and before the trip I had told my coworker that I wouldn’t ever choose to go there, but I knew Sam’s Town would see me again.

In my message at Battle Born Studios, I wrote, “I have finally seen the lights.” This was a little untrue as I wouldn’t get to go to Sam’s Town until later that day and I received some gentle ribbing about how I had lied about it. That line in Sam’s Town (the song)—”have you ever seen the lights?”—is such a reprieve in that song. It’s a moment to breathe and it’s a call for understanding. Have you ever seen something that meant so much to you that you would leave behind everything you knew just to get back to it? A place you can go to where things are better? I don’t think I have a physical place like that yet, but the memories I have surrounding this band and my friends serves as well enough. Online spaces like Twitter and Tumblr when I was a desperately lonely teenager—that was my Sam’s Town. Those were the people who understood me more than anyone else.

At the second show we went to, The Killers played Sam’s Town. I cried as I barked out every word—words that I’ve only ever cried to alone in my bedroom. I remember not being able to see the stage because my eyes were closed for most of it, and two of the older women behind me shared an “aww!” Brandon asked, “Have you ever seen the lights?” And I could finally, truthfully, say yes. I believed, and my faith was finally rewarded. That’s religion. At the end of the song, all of my friends joined hands and sang, “I see London, I see Sam’s Town. Holds my hand and lets my hair down.” That night, I texted a friend of mine about it and said, “I feel like I finally got what I deserved.”

I think I’ll be happy about it for the rest of my life. At the end of the show, Brandon asks the crowd if they’ve been healed. If they feel better. It may be silly to care this much about something like this, but I have been healed. I spent so many years hurting for various reasons and while I worked on myself and got myself to a better place, I still carried the weight around with me. I imagine my younger self seeing me getting to experience this show and these songs after years of believing she would never get to see her favorite band. I want to tell her that it will happen one day and all she has to do is wait. And maybe having to wait is better, because you will never take it for granted. No matter how many times I see The Killers, it will always feel like the first.

The next morning as I waited for my flight home at the airport, one of Brandon Flowers’ solo songs came on over the loud speaker. Magdalena, the story of a sacred pilgrimage that takes place every year in Mexico. And maybe it actually is silly (for real) to compare this real religious pilgrimage to me getting to go to Las Vegas for a week, but it was a fitting end to my trip.

“Tell him that I made the journey

and tell him that my heart is true.

I’d like his blessing of forgiveness

before the angels send it through.”