Searching for God in “West Hills”
“West Hills” from The Killers’ 2021 album “Pressure Machine” is sung with the swelling ache of the unresolved tensions between individual and community and spirit and structure that has existed as long as the western hills themselves.
The song begins, not with music, but with clips of interviews from a small, country town. One speaker praises it, “Just a nice small community, everybody knows everybody.” But other conversations reveal a darker side “my little brother, he moved into the community. And they tried to tape him to a flagpole or a tree up at the high school. So if you don’t fit their mold…”
We never learn the reason for the persecution, but it sets the tone for the tension in the song, and presumably in the singer’s attitude towards the town. Some find peace and happiness in the stability and structure of a place where there is no “private business” and where everyone shows up to church at least looking devout and clean on the outside. But a few are restless.
The song’s first lines place the singer right in the middle of the devout town, but unimpressed by the jargon of “His Holy Ghost stories and bloodshed.” While the congregation bows their heads under a church roof, he goes out to where “the light could place its hands on my head / In the West Hills.” The singer looks for a benediction in natural light, not organized religion. He rejects what he sees as the superficial self-righteousness of a church that presumes to judge him, but is still drawn to the expansive and wild beauty that he feels is connected to spiritual desires. Standing in that natural light clarifies his vision and allows him to see and love the people that society rejects — the heroin addicts, the woman he loves who already has children. When a jailhouse cell or a church roof is erected, it blocks the light that allows someone to see a whole person instead of just sinful acts to be judged.
When the singer himself is caught and charged with heroin possession, he comments that “They got me for possession of enough to kill / The horses that run / Free in the West Hills.” He sings with a sense of irony. Possessing something strong enough to kill a creature of vivacious beauty and freedom is criminalized by the same town that possesses enough Bible-beaters to kill a vivacious and free soul.
The tension builds to a crescendo with the final lines, where the singer admits his crimes, but can’t accept society’s judgement. He’s confident that if he stood before God,
“He’ll reject my actions / But he will know my heart / And he’ll prepare a place for me / Where happiness instills / And the light puts its loving hands on my head / Free in the West Hills”
The God who created the light that shines on both the degenerate and the pious and on the stable housewife of eleven years and the wild wanderer — His is the only judgment the singer accepts.
Even though he knows that God and the church agree on his actions’ immorality, he senses that there’s something about God that his religious upbringing failed to communicate. It’s both a wild, mystical beauty that he sees in “the horses that run free” and the quiet calm he feels as the sunlight places a gentle caress on him “in the west hills.” God is infinite enough to contain both sides of the tension — He’s transcendent and immanent, awful and personal, and created both individuals to express themselves and communities to impose rules. The singer longs for a place “prepar[ed] for me” where the oppositions in his life will be resolved by unification of both, rather than elimination of one. But it’s not a place he sees in his hometown religion.