Learning to Crawl (1984)

This must be approximately the point where Chrissie Hynde made the calculation to break for the mainstream even as she managed to retain a modicum of punk-rock credibility. Both factors were more or less direct result of losing half of her band—guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon, both to drug overdoses—in the intervening years between the second Pretenders album and this one. Also having a child by Ray Davies, a marker of whose development provided Hynde with the title of the album. That title is obviously apt in other ways as well. No small part of the work of getting this album done was finding players, thus for example the appearances, on "Back on the Chain Gang," "My City Was Gone," and "Thin Line Between Love and Hate," of Andrew Bodnar, Billy Bremner, Tony Butler, and Paul Carrack. There's a lot of good stuff here; it's a very strong album, with a brooding, rueful air that developed a side of Hynde previously sidelined for the most part. The material is a little uneven, a motley hodgepodge of singles and multiple sessions. Long-time Pretenders producer Chris Thomas and indeed Hynde herself account for continuity. But there's also a powerful sense of searching and probing here. It is an aftermath project, connecting naturally to albums like John Wesley Harding or Tonight's the Night, proceeding out of a post-traumatic emotional state and carefully putting pieces together again. It's probably Chrissie Hynde's most thoughtful album and second only to the amazing debut in her catalog. She's never done anything quite like it before or since. "Middle of the Road," "Back on the Chain Gang," and "Time the Avenger" is the 1-2-3 way she starts it, and there you see the themes she is working with plain. Some of it is lightweight throwaways, such as "Watching the Clothes," which somehow reminds me of something on Double Fantasy (as you can see, she is either determinedly projecting herself into the rock pantheon at this point, or I am framing it to see it that way). But my favorites are toward the end of the set, with "My City Was Gone," which is actually one of the best songs about Ohio in a surprisingly crowded field, produced to a tee but convincingly full of tender and bitter emotion. That is followed by the cover of the 1971 Persuaders soul hit, "Thin Line Between Love and Hate." I love the way that nothing in the story of that song of simmering domestic tension has much of anything to do with anything Hynde had recently experienced, but she nonetheless took all that and poured it into the song. It is a remarkable performance, as fragile and beautiful as it is hard-hitting, and feels to me somehow like one of Hynde's most nakedly confessional songs even though it is a cover. Classic.