All These Things That I've Done

Flowers wrote it alone, and it was recorded with Jeff Saltzman in Berkeley, mixed by Alan Moulder, with the Sweet Inspirations as a gospel choir. Its inspiration was Matt Pinfield, the MTV and VH1 presenter, then a Columbia Records executive who had tried to sign the band. Pinfield ties the chorus line about soul and soldiers to his work mentoring soldier-musicians back from Iraq, and his 2016 memoir takes the song's title. The band dedicated it to him at the iHeartRadio festival in 2019. Flowers said the chorus was "Lou Reed funneled through the Las Vegas Strip", and the record draws on U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind and, in its bassline, Bowie's Slow Burn.

It was the third Hot Fuss single in Britain, in August 2004, and the fourth in America in 2005. It reached 18 in Britain and topped the Canadian rock chart, was nominated for a Grammy in 2006, losing to U2, and in 2021 Billboard ranked it second among the greatest song bridges of the century.

Live

It was the only song the Killers played at Live 8 in Hyde Park in July 2005, and Robbie Williams later worked its refrain into his own set. Coldplay and U2 have since quoted the same line at Las Vegas shows with the band in the crowd. In 2009 the Killers played it with Coldplay, Bono and Gary Barlow at a War Child concert. It is their third most played song, logged 1,044 times, and Imagine Dragons, Walk the Moon and Kris Allen have covered it live. Justin Timberlake mimes it in Southland Tales.

Anton Corbijn shot its second video in Las Vegas in May 2005, partly at the Neon Museum, with the band as cowboys attacked by women with boomerangs, after Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, told out of order. The upload in the hypersongs web is that 2005 Corbijn video, a shortened edit of the Hot Fuss recording.