‘I went back to my room and I wrote this lyric out. ‘And the guys were talking about their families and their wives and I said, “Well I do everything alone. ‘We were in the studio hanging out,’ Hynde begins, dark eyes flashing beneath a dirty blonde fringe. The title track is a superbly spiky take on the joys of solitude. It has been time well spent because these songs are special. ‘Forty eight hours to sing them, 40 years of… preparation.’ ‘Yeah,’ says Hynde, fleetingly ruminating on the writing process. I really dig this guy”.Īnd so it came to pass that the extraordinary vocals for The Pretenders’ Alone album, were recorded in 48 hours. ‘He said, “We will do them all in the last two days. What am I going to do?” He goes, “That’s the least of my worries”. ‘Halfway through the session I said to Dan, “Man, I can’t fucking sing. I was spending all my time in my hotel room just popping Tylenol all day long. ‘I finally got to the studio but I had some sort of chest infection and by the time I got to Nashville I had no voice. He goes, “That is the least of my worries. I said, “I have only sent you eight songs”. I called Dan and said, “I don’t think I have sent you enough songs to go on an album yet. ‘About a month before we were going to go into the studio. Those of a delicate disposition, or the few misguided souls who haven’t read Hynde’s 2015 best-selling autobiography Reckless, should be warned: she sings like an angel, but talks like a truck driver. He makes cool stuff sound even better,’ Hynde says kindly avoiding technical terminology.įizzing with infectious energy and still punk rock skinny at 65, the singer, a natural raconteur, orders a dairy-free cappuccino, shunts up the sleeves of her Elvis t-shirt and picks up the story. The team, approvingly described by Hynde as ‘real people playing real instruments’, features Johnny Cash’s former bass player Dave Roe and country rocker Kenny Vaughan on guitar plus sundry members of Dan Auerbach’s side project The Arcs: Richard Swift, drums, Leon Michels, keyboards and Russ Pahl providing sly curlicues of pedal steel.Īuerbach stood as captain, producer, multi-instrumentalist – he unleashes some outlandish electric guitar – and all round cool head. I guess the team just went out and scored some goals.’ I don’t know how we achieved it but it sounds classic. To me if you are laughing it is rock and roll. Every time I hear it, it just makes me laugh. ‘It’s a riot,’ announces Chrissie Hynde landing in a subterranean restaurant banquet sans ceremony or entourage. Thirty six years after The Pretenders’ first album, Alone could be the older, wiser, badder sister to that exhilarating debut. With characteristic perversity, she called it ‘Alone’. Having effectively reformed her ground-breaking band, Hynde decided to rechristen the record. Ultimately, this could only mean one thing: The Pretenders were back.Īnd this wasn’t a cynical brand reboot, more a happy accident.Ĭhrissie Hynde shrugs, still as cool as the other side of the pillow. Then it dawned that those driving guitars, ragged-but-righteous arrangements, the tough yet tender lyrics delivered by the most distinctive voice of a generation sounded fantastically familiar. The new record had been tentatively entitled Chrissie Hynde Practices Her Autograph. In a nutshell: Chrissie Hynde was working on solo project with the Black Key’s Dan Auerbach in his Nashville studio, organically recording the follow up to her 2014 album, the superb Stockholm. It was these simple words that heralded the unforeseen return of the greatest group on the planet. ‘It’s good to hear The Pretenders again.’
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