Chrissie Hynde doesn’t like therapy. “Maybe I am now,” she says when confronted with the fact that she keeps titling songs and albums around the word hate. “I’ve never been in therapy but maybe I am now. I’m finding out something I didn’t know.”
She’s talking about Hate for Sale, the Pretenders record she swears isn’t about the apocalypse of 2020, politics, or the endless scroll of Twitter rage. “No, because the world’s been going in this direction for 2,000 years,” she shrugs. “People making bad decisions and being selfish—that’s not new. If anything, the title was supposed to be a bit of fun.”
Fun, in Chrissie Hynde terms, means rock songs about bad choices, selfishness, and using “love” like a narcotic. “I don’t think it’s a unique angle,” she says when I point out her “love as addiction” imagery. “That’s a stock go-to. Billie Holiday did it. Otis Redding did it. But that’s the beauty of songs—you don’t always know what they’re about. You adapt them to your own needs. If you’re in some crazy relationship and you get one bad text and your day’s ruined—that’s like not getting a fix, isn’t it?”
That bite—part cynic, part romantic—is why Hate for Sale feels more alive than it should for a band entering its fifth decade. It’s also the first Pretenders record to feature founding drummer Martin Chambers in years, which Hynde admits makes it sound more “Pretenders.” “Martin has a very unique, distinctive sound. He’s fun, he’s a real drummer’s drummer. And he’s a riot to watch live.”
She also finally sat down with guitarist James Walbourne, the guy who’s been in her band for ages but never wrote with her until now. “We always thought we’d get together and just never did,” she admits. “You’re on the road and you think, Oh yeah, we’ll get a room in the back of the bus, but my head isn’t right for it. Then we’d come off the road and James would be on to other projects. We finally said, we’re really going to sit down and do it this time.”
Walbourne’s influence is all over the record, from the Jerry Lee Lewis-style swagger to the songs Hynde swears you can actually dance to. “James is a real music person,” she says. “His favorite artist is Elvis Presley. He’s one of those guys whose dad took him and his brother to see everybody, didn’t matter if it was Liza Minnelli or Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s very old school. Plays everything. We made a very clear plan—not much of a plan really—just two guitars, bass, drums, a smattering of keyboards. Back to basics.”
That stripped-down immediacy hits hardest on “Didn’t Want to Be This Lonely,” a song Hynde and Walbourne intentionally crafted in “a very old school” way. “We really paid attention to that one,” she says. “Tried to sneak in a key change that wasn’t obvious, just to lift it. You can’t buy that in the shops, you have to sit down and figure it out.”
Of course, in classic Hynde fashion, she insists on deflating the idea that anything about her career is carefully plotted. “I’m pretty lazy and I just keep doing the same thing,” she laughs. “I think I’m on the spectrum—I just do the same thing over and over.”
Except she doesn’t. Around the time we first spoke, she was prepping a book of paintings (Adding the Blue) and a jazz-dub-psychedelic-orchestral side project (Valve Bone Woe) that sounded nothing like the Pretenders. “I thought I’d be into painting since I was a kid, but rock and roll waylaid me,” she explains. “Once I started listening to the radio, game over. Years later, I finally picked up a brush. I didn’t even know how to clean it—wrecked a few along the way. But once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
She swears she’s not interested in the art world. “Half the stuff I see, I just think, you’re a phony. But that’s part of my job in a rock band, to be cynical about everything. For me, art—any art—is supposed to lift me, not disturb me. I’m already disturbed.”
And then there’s the cows. Hynde has been hammering on about cow protection for 40 years and knows she sounds bored of herself. “It’s not only uphill, but I’m bored stupid of this subject,” she admits. Still, she dives into the details: small farms, no slaughter, hand-milking, oxen put to work plowing fields. “Unlike putting 10,000 in a warehouse, which just creates methane, small farming restores topsoil. And that’s the real problem—we’re losing our topsoil. If we don’t have it, we all starve.”
She’s lost animal-rights patrons because of her pro-milk stance (“they’re anti-milk because of industrial farming, but what I’m talking about is the opposite”), but Hynde doesn’t care. “Meat eating is so far behind me, that’s way in my past. Who does it now? That’s like smoking.”
For someone who claims to be lazy, she never stops moving: new records, side projects, books, activism. Even Bob Dylan covers during lockdown. “It’d be easy to copy Bob’s style, everyone can do it,” she says. “So we tried to find songs where we could interpret them in our own way. I’m not saying we did them better than Bob… but yeah, we did.”
She admits Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” pulled her out of pandemic malaise. “Someone sent me that song and everything seemed to change from that moment. It lifted me out of that feeling of being locked down.”
When I tell her Hate for Sale might be the best Pretenders record in decades, she brushes it off but doesn’t quite hide her smile. “That’s what I thought about Bob too. Thank you, man, for still doing it. For just being with us all this time. It means a lot.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
