album release
Rock’n’Roll without warming up: The Pretenders melancholic
Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders. photo
© Ian West/PA Wire/dpa
On their new album “Relentless”, the Pretenders sound calmer and more melancholic than usual. Frontwoman Chrissie Hynde has lost none of her vocal power at the age of 71.
The new record begins quite melancholy with “Losing My Sense Of Taste”. Corona is to blame. “This is of course an allusion to the whole lockdown, where many people have lost their sense of taste and smell,” says Hynde in an interview with the German Press Agency in London. The British metropolis has been the adopted home of the American from Akron/Ohio for decades.
The singer wrote the new songs with guitarist James Walbourne. Almost the entire first half of the album is calm, melancholic and almost contemplative. In “A Love”, Hynde compares love to drug addiction. In the sluggish “Merry Widow” she sings with wit about being alone. The song sounds dark melodically, but the content is extremely amusing. “It’s not a serious song,” Hynde insists. “When we play that live, James and I look at each other and start laughing because it’s so silly.”
Hardly recorded, almost forgotten
Surprisingly, the Pretenders boss, who can be quite uncomfortable, prefers not to talk about the new songs. “I’d have to listen to the album again for that, I haven’t heard it for months,” she says, apologizing and looking a bit embarrassed. “Since we recorded that, I’ve done some other projects, so that’s hard for me. I can’t analyze my own stuff.”
The musician prefers to chat about other things. She says that aging doesn’t bother her at all, quite the opposite. “I enjoy it. I enjoy getting older and looking back on decades of experience,” she says. “You start to understand things better, all the things you went through when you were young and wild. You realize that some things you can change and some things you can’t. I think as you get older you become a lot more relaxed .”
Surprisingly, her voice hasn’t changed much in the 44 years since her debut album “The Pretenders” with cult songs like “Kid” and “Brass In Pocket”, although Hynde didn’t stop smoking until she was over 60. “Smoking takes the highs out of your voice,” she says. “I’ve never had voice training. I don’t do any warm-up exercises. I don’t even think about it. I think a lot of it is psychological. I don’t know about opera singers. I don’t know about other areas of singing or other types of music, but in rock ‘n’ roll? Oh come on…”
In many styles on the way
With the Pretenders, Hynde has achieved the feat of appealing to music fans of all styles, whether pop, punk, new wave or rock. The band is currently on tour in the US as a support act for the hard rockers Guns N’ Roses, playing in the big stadiums before returning to Europe at the end of September. There The Pretenders will play at the Hamburg Reeperbahn Festival and at the Columbia Theater Berlin, where they will surely perform some songs from “Relentless”.
On the album, the mood changes with the seventh of the twelve songs. As if the name says it all, “Let The Sun Come In” gets a little brighter. With its pleasing guitar tones, it’s a typical Pretenders number in the tradition of “Kid” or “Back On The Chain Gang”. “Vainglorious” is another cool song with a little more steam. “When we started it was a much slower, quieter album,” says Hynde, “and eventually it became more rock ‘n’ roll. I guess that’s inevitable with us.”
But also in the second half – earlier one would have spoken of the B-side – softer or slower songs like the beautiful “Look Away” with folk influences or the ballad “Just Let It Go” predominate. The sad ballad “I Think About You Daily” concludes without band accompaniment. Radiohead member and film composer Jonny Greenwood orchestrated the atmospheric string accompaniment. It’s a poignant finale to an overall melancholy late work by the Pretenders.