This long entry went unpublished for ages and is perhaps best left alone if you've just eaten a surfeit of chocolate or are prone to nausea attacks. I'm usually not, but when they strike, they are proof of the adage about the treatment being almost worse than the cure.
I've needed staying power and still do. I'm not clear of nasty episodes yet and self-deception can come easy, sometimes even when you are listening to a band as bad at it as the Pretenders. I considered that my manic-depressive disorder had eased off once I felt physically stronger again after the last cycle, with a warning to remember. I keep most of my insight into this vicious illness in the Orchard, but decided to make an exception after "the music stopped".
The worst was yet to come. One or two people close to me knew this three months back when I didn't. Maybe that's where I am now. I remained in two minds -- if any right one at all -- about a column that weaves so personal a tale in with the career and music of a style-snatching, trend-setting rock band that has lasted for decades with a strong-willed woman up front as its driving force.
But why not in the end? When it comes to bands who have real staying power, consistently show it and sustain it, there's no finer example than the Pretenders, whose songs helped to keep me going me in a horrible period when sometimes it got hard to listen to music at all. This inability is disturbing indeed in somebody with no doubt about the tremendous power of music as a healing force.
I sorely wanted to know what had gone so wrong.
"Perhaps more than any other band, The Pretenders epitomized the exciting musical climate of the early 1980s. The group represented a powerful fusion of the most important musical ideas of the time, from the off-kilter new wave whimsy of Devo and The Cars to the hard-edged, autobiographical street poetry of Patti Smith to the straight-ahead politicized aggression of the London punk scene to the passionate, idiosyncratic rock and roll aesthetic of Elvis Costello. But unlike so many other essential groups of that era, The Pretenders avoided becoming casualties of their own success, in large part due to the boundless charisma and indomitable spirit of their one-of-a-kind frontwoman, Chrissie Hynde." (Jesse Ashlock, beginning a review of 'Loose Screw' and a brief overview of the the band from its origins, at Epitonic.com, Nov. 2002)
A beginning in somebody else's 'brave new world'
 For Ashlock to write of an "indomitable spirit", the will to press on regardless, is absolutely right. Hynde today is a woman in her 50s, who has been resilient from the start more than 20 years ago, when people caught on and loved an aggressive, proud first pair of albums, 'Pretenders' and 'Pretenders II', before the tragic setback of the loss of two band members through drug overdoses.
That was in Maggie Thatcher's brave new Britain, a nation charged with political talk about going "back to basics" and facing hard realities. Its newly elected rulers often solicited angry responses from the young; in retrospect, the battlegrounds of those days left a lasting legacy in the notion of self-promotion, sometimes paired with an alarming social selfishness. Authorities presented the times as tough, which they had started to become. The early Pretenders (home site) never bought into sentiment any more than the Tories did. Hynde could certainly snarl about sexual politics, then more of a preoccupation than any other kind.
On the ragged socialist left, which some found pot-bellied and sagging, intellectuals I managed to read had a very hard time presenting their economic ideas as a success story. A government that was so socially conservative people talked about reintroducing strong Victorian values claimed to have a more realistic economic approach. It argued that some of the remedies to a nation's ills lay in the withdrawal of state funding where market forces could be trusted to hack it and build their own kind of "classless society". Everyone would pay their way and get encouragement to own property as a means to a new independence, a sense of self-worth and the establishment of a social order that would "naturally" sort itself out if people were left mainly to their own devices by an otherwise strident stick-wielding prime minister low in carrots.
It didn't work, of course, though I suppose the model was idealistic in an odd kind of way, if anybody thought it would bring out the best in people's natures. In the United States that Chrissie Hynde abandoned for the excitement of buzzing London, elderly politicians like Ronald Reagan had similar ideas. However, many people who "made it" financially relied on old educational and buddy networks and still had other established means of support those in government didn't see fit to question. Friends and family I visited who settled down did often get nice houses, cars, enjoyable outings, the rest of it, if they had the skills and the jobs. But some people I had known before leaving Britain who moved up north in the hope life there would be cheaper, with values that suited them better, usually got a warm welcome but a very rough economic ride. North of London and the well-shod "home counties", a strongly resistant labour force was fighting tooth and nail to keep what it had by way of communities and jobs. Gradually the government set out, with its business and media allies, to destroy the social structures that had sustained the "lower classes".
By then I was way out of it. I quit Britain in 1980 just as the Pretenders had begun to create a name for themselves. Whenever I returned to London itself, large parts of the city seemed to have an increasing, in-depth shabbiness that wasn't nearly so apparent in the Paris of those days. Unlike most friends who also became expatriates, I never kept a foot in each country and very rarely went back. But from France, I kept an ear and eye on the turmoil, taking sides during brief working visits to show "solidarity" occasionally on picket lines with people like the miners -- then the emblematic foes of the new order and since the subject of many a movie, like the strong music-centred colliery band one, 'Brassed Off'. I could be no party to a manichean view that saw "good" in the levelling power of the markets and "bad" in the power of deeply entrenched labour unions and other strong bodies seen as monstrous dinosaurs holding back social progress.
The Pretenders saw it all through and sometimes sung about the general climate rather than particularities personal to us all. Sometimes I encountered the fallout at first hand. Young journalists who followed me to France for whatever reason mostly proved by the late 1990s to be extremely different animals from me. Politically, they had lived nothing but that "Iron Lady" and her legacy in government, whom with the inevitable honourable exceptions -- just as today's so-called "centre-left" has some decent people in it -- were crews of such growing incompetence and pervasive corruption that people just called it "sleaze". Eventually a stoic nation got so sick it threw them out.
Those young journalists and many other Brits of their age who arrived in France struck me sometimes as a brashly arrogant and self-centred generation of individuals, sometimes out of understandable ignorance. Notions of solidarity and the caring ideals with which I'd grown up were so alien to them -- since many lacked any reference points outside the family and rigorous kind of schooling in basics the Tories considered so important -- that some tended to spit on French society and its different ways apparently automatically.
Such people still live in Paris and like expatriates everywhere are largely a world unto themselves. They plunge down from time to time, particularly at weekends, into the society that hosts them, when they find any profit in its ways, on the food shelves or in concert venues and sports arenas.
Some people I know describe Paris bars as "pubs", and indeed there are such pretend pubs, packed weekend dens that have nothing either British or French about them. I would occasionally drop in to such bars for the company, but this was an irregular habit I lost completely after a few years.
I never was much of a party-going beast, though I enjoyed some. My nights out were mainly musical or cinematic ones with friends or spent at places where music came second to the very important business of stuffing our faces on French food, drinking prodigious amounts of wine and seriously believing, particularly in student company, that we were putting the world to rights with all our talk.
I integrated the way many people do. Once I knew France well enough beyond a capital that can hardly be considered representative of the country, it briefly entertained me to read some of the numerous and occasionally renowned blogs written by expats here with the sole aim of slagging off the society over which their writers float, sometimes with an incisive perspective. But their appeal soon palled. The people best placed to criticise any nation, maybe with the exception of those like very fine journalists and diplomats who drop in for a posting here with a fresh approach and thus see it differently, are bound to be those who grow up in it.
After sporadic, stumbling adventures with French women, then marrying a girl from Normandy to whom Paris was in some ways as strange in the 1980s as it was to me, still relatively new out of a Britain I thought insupportably class-bound and socially stagnant, I got to know my wife's family over several years and had a daughter with her. But none of these experiences I have been reflecting on lately stopped me from becoming a profoundly uprooted person myself.
It took recent setbacks, including a bid to return to work after what slowly turned out to be by far the deepest episode of manic-depression I've have ever endured, to realise how isolated I have become. It never bothered me before to be a loner, usually very outgoing at work and in company, but professedly content with my own most of the time after a divorce in 1993. When not seeing friends or nursing insanely romantic notions about successive women until that stopped in 2004 and I felt it was time for a really new start, I've had plenty to keep me busy.
For a number of private reasons, it was unwise to become too involved with another woman in the years after the divorce. I know this to have been true, but despite a long period of therapy that ended late in 2004, the last manic-depressive cycle brought up against emotional issues I'd long thought resolved. These didn't emerge suddenly, but began really to surface just around the time I felt ready to return to work. They hit me hard in the week I was getting into the Pretenders, doing my usual thing of trying to hear what's going on behind the music and inclined to research, by reading up Hynde and company, what motivated the band to do songs that include hard-edged social observation ('Time', 'Middle of the Road') along with the deeply personal (the loss and strength in a big hit, 'Back on the Chain Gang').
I couldn't understand why intense loneliness and a feeling of being able to do nothing about it, for lack of energy and the immense effort it took for the slightest act of will, took such a crippling hold over me just few weeks ago after the depressive episode was "over". What I put on the Log then was concerned more with dislocation in time as a curious phenomenon reflected in music, which can play many tricks with time: they include the sense we all occasionally have of being in two places or times at once. Songs can be superb at conveying this feeling in the use simply of juxtaposed musical styles, let alone the lyrics.
There was a work day when I felt so bewildered and battered by an unexpected surge of searing memories that I could focus on nothing else and had to quit, but then I believed and told my colleagues it must be a matter of needing a little more time to get used to the subtle new emotional palette I felt I'd been given in the few weeks of recovery from the depression that began on March 14.
The realisation began to dawn that my sense of being so uprooted has less to do with a failure to implement the outgoing lifestyle adjustments recommended by wise friends, since I had no problem agreeing with those and indeed making a start as soon as I could, than with what has gradually welled up from deep down during some equally necessary times of constructively engaged solitude.
The pill and Pretenders: lies and truths
There is much more to it than jokes I was able to make then about the "Pinocchio effect", when "new" emotions really did seem like the gift of a mental painting set containing more pastel shades than anything I felt I'd known before in a sustained way. Pinocchio, however, was quite a liar! Publishing this column comes with the very slow realisation that I have also been unwittingly deceiving myself about some very important aspects of my life for decades.
 What laid me low again, just while I was getting into Chrissie Hynde's band, was quite simply a pill, one part of the treatment prescribed early in April, when it began to mess badly with my head (its name isn't visible in the little collage; even if it were, you know what they say about one man's meat). If I express myself at all clearly now, it has taken many weeks to get this far. Progress has been very slow, my writing takes longer than ever before, and I've lived the strange feeling that goes with a deep depression when each day is an eternity of hours, but weeks fly past and any feeling of achievement is measured in terms of the very small, ordinary things done during the days.
I turned to Pretenders when I could for musical solace, since that is one thing they have never done: live up to an ironic name. Their songs are solidly anchored in gritty realities. These include making the best of the changing sounds and themes of the times, avoiding turning into the tools of the music business, and the sustained effort of preparation and studio albums, as well as performance.
Only Hynde and veteran drummer Martin Chambers can know how often they must have taken to the road, reworking old songs and doing the new ones to create a repertoire of dozens, though at one stage in 1990, Chrissie was the only original Pretender left, until she started to rebuild a team in 1994.
Our lives and music are constructed on the simplest of building blocks. This is very apparent on Pretenders' albums, where the ear can easily distinguish different pop styles taken in over the years and moulded by Hynde and fellow musicians into a sound that remains definitively theirs for all the changes. To feel the same of daily life became equally easy when mine began to disintegrate, my plans for the summer collapsed, and every day became a series of tiny tasks to which I'd generally give no thought.
At places like Amazon, fans always list very different personal choices for favourite CDs and the ones they like less during such a long career as the Pretenders. I'm rarely good at favourites, even when my head is in full working order; even less so then, since I like to approach albums as wholes and listen to them that way, each in their context, though I'll sometimes linger on a song.
I'm very aware how much my listening is a matter of mood and trusting to instinct and a magic iPod finger to find me the music of the moment. If I don't like records, I won't write them up unless it's to say something constructive about where and why the music seems to "go wrong". To do that, you need a very good idea of what the musicians themselves are seeking to do.
What I never realised is how very susceptible we can be to moods and our emotions in the exercise of judgement, maybe unaware of the way we can be swayed by such forces unless other people tell us -- or we literally "lose our reason". This became fully apparent to me when something happened to take the lid off.
Perhaps it was that pill, finally. Old memories keep on coming up, more every day, and I've not yet asked my therapist how much this drug with a vast list of side-effects is one of those that unlock such doors. There is no just screwing the lid back on again. It was just one milligram every night of an allegedly "mild" substance in my system and the dosage had been steadily reduced from four milligrams since first I was told I'd better start taking it early in April.
The Inner Shaman I've described -- the medicine man or woman we each have inside us, who knows what we need when we can listen to a quiet voice that pays no heed to our capacity for self-deception -- knew when the pill began doing me harm. It told me so, just after I renewed acquaintance with Ms Hynde and her style as a very articulate woman who packs a punch in her voice and slips kicks into her lyrics. She's too smart to shy away from language some might consider trite if it holds home truths of the kind we all need to know.
Some of those home truths hit me inordinately hard, since Hynde's so good at telling them, and a while later the music just had to stop for two reasons. I felt hugely vulnerable to its emotional content, instead of finding it therapeutic, and when I could handle that I mislaid my ability to focus and got utterly lost in my own sluggish thoughts and the strong memory surges.
At first, I gently told my therapist the medication was disagreeing with me and making me feel ill, without mentioning the problem of attention. He gave me a lesson in "effets sécondaires", as the French call side-effects. A few days later, I told him by telephone that I had to stop. I was often flat on my back with nausea and panic attacks about stuff I knew to be unimportant. This was when I lost much of my willpower. The nausea kept on coming in sickening waves that drained my energy and emptied my head.
Such episodes, which seem to be abating, leave me emotionally and morally grounded. I feel even more grounded than when a song about an aviator's last days alone on an island got covered here. On account of the multiple layers of meaning Heather Nova's genius enabled her to slip into four minutes of poetry and music that were among other fine songs, I then said her album 'Redbird' would make a list I very rarely imagine being able or wanting to formulate, "Nick's Top 10."
I had a lucid weekend in which I returned to Pretenders and found them eminently suitable while I confronted a few of my own pretences, reasoned myself out of taking the therapist for a mad sadist, realised a the need to concentrate on basics and understood that when I saw my general practitioner, a friend from whom I had planned to get a second opinion about a man he'd already told me to put some faith in, this doctor wouldn't change his own tune.
He didn't. He said he wasn't qualified to judge such a drug, though he understood how I hated it, and the decision remained with the expert. Somehow I got through a few more terrifying days until my appointed hour with the therapist. When I saw him, I was fighting an unexpected storm of resentment, rage and burning tears that very nearly drove me out of the waiting room in embarrassment.
I threw everything I could at him, including a collapse of trust in myself that had led to a near total loss of confidence in both the therapist and his treatment. I guess a different story started when he agreed to take me off that awful pill immediately.
The building blocks of behaviour and music
I'm unsure exactly what the new tale is, just knowing it includes the building blocks and the simplest stuff of life and music. The therapist's sole goal with the drug had been to slow me down more than I already was when writing about a feeling of living in two time zones at once. In slowing me down, he most certainly succeeded.
His method was nearly too much, but we found common ground in the word "mistake", defined in this Log's Orchard as a learning experience. I acknowledge that with what I'll persist in regarding as no mild drug at all, given my bodys reaction to being "poisoned" by it, that the therapist couldn't know exactly what would happen. I readily admit that it was only when it happened that I felt able to take in some more raw home truths my regular doctor confirmed after the weekend I worked out a few of them for myself.
 The Pretenders helped me stay on a musical course whenever I could. Maybe we all need sometimes to think hard about basic things we do every day and usually take as givens, whether we happen to be highly creative animals or are people contented with lives enriched by the existence of others and what we share in families and in our work and friendships. We tend to protest about routines and how tedious life can seem, until its patterns and structures are taken away abruptly the way this happened to me.
Hynde changed her own life when she upped sticks from the American Midwest town of Akron in Ohio for London and walked straight into the punk scene. Biographical reviewers make plenty of her love life and the way she has dealt with it in music. Indeed, love relationships are meat and drink to the Pretenders, like they are for many musicians who give us lasting pleasure and help us sometimes by baring their souls in hit songs and work that's much less well-known but to the point.
Such soul-baring takes a courage in musicians I've often admired on the Log. Hynde's semi-autobiographical songs include a selection on a recent album I want to discuss since it deals in almost nothing but love, one way or another, forming a stark contrast to all I know of its largely upbeat 1999 predecessor, 'Viva el Amor', which I'd prefer not to tackle in detail until I know it better than I do.
Years before that, Hynde was so much the right person in the right place, at a time when women felt a crying need to challenge men for front stage in popular music that for some she became the "queen of punk". This is a small crown for a first-rate guitarist and sassy lyricist who spans so many styles, like the men with her in the successive line-ups (Pretenders Archives). It doesn't fit, like any other that tries to pin Hynde down.
Caught in the act after the inevitably mixed critical success of successive studio CDs, the Pretenders in 1995 released a very good live album, 'The Isle of View', which offers an overview of a long period while giving old songs new treatment, the way musicians will when they release what are called "unplugged" or acoustic versions of familiar material.
The Pretenders have produced at least two dozen highly memorable songs in almost every listener's ears. I've begun to understand better why the music stopped, so I could take no pleasure in what is one of the most important things in my life and started even to fear where many kinds of music might lead me. All I could take during bouts of feeling poisoned -- when trying to listen to anything was better than doing nothing at all since I was also housebound and the smallest jobs seemed like mountains to climb -- was what scholars call the music of the "third period" in some classical composers' lives, when their genius has led them into domains that surpass the purely personal.
All I wanted were serene heights of some work by J.S. Bach and other perfect masters of non-verbal styles, however ultimately challenging in harmonies I temporarily found it hard to memorise, like those explored in Beethoven's last string quartets. Such men may seem a million miles from where I left off before picking up again with Hynde, and that was a diva in her style: Amy Lee of the US metal outfit Evanescence. This band has gone quiet with new work in the making, but its very wide-screen 'Fallen' was what I enjoyed before Pretenders.
 There are no "million mile" distances in music. Bach and Beethoven aren't so very remote from Amy Lee, pictured here in some of her preferred stage regalia, or from Chrissie Hynde, if only in that both women have classical skills or aptitudes. Lee helps to drive a huge metal band with the years of training she uses to bridge styles. She takes pride in her classics and in doing things differently each time, which means that all to be said about her in a piece on Pretenders is that the new album from Evanescence won't be anything like the last.
Thus it was when Pretenders set about 'Learning to Crawl', the relatively early album I enjoyed contrasting with the 'Loose Screw' of 2002. I'm learning to crawl once more myself. For Hynde it was about picking up again after the real horror of losing two fellow band founders to drugs and discovering herself anew ("I'm not the kind of cat I used to be, I've got a kid, I'm 33") with tough songs and a good new guitarist, Robbie MacIntosh.
I thought I'd already done my own learning to crawl after life's worst years, which were when the music stopped for a whole decade. That's a time I've recounted in the past, writing how music gradually returned into my existence, so I could pick up where I'd left off before a spell in an arid desert. During a previous period of therapy, I had to deal with issues that arose over that time, many of which dated back to troubled teenage years and, it also emerged, some key childhood events.
It was then that I accepted, albeit reluctantly, the healing value of regressive kinds of therapy, when they take people back a long way. Today, I can't say it was just that time on the pill that took the lid off much more. It's impossibly absurd to make such a simplistic assertion when I look at turns this Log has taken while I have been able to keep it through worsening manic-depressive episodes.
Often I've not known, as already described in the Orchard, when I've been depressed. I certainly didn't articulate it to anyone and couldn't present consistent symptoms, maybe because of my considerable gift for mistaking such physical manifestations for the underlying cause of my woes.
I fell readily upon 'Loose Screw,' which Hynde only partly ironically described as "easy listening" after its release in 2002. On 'Loose Screw' and one or two tracks on 'Learning to Crawl', it's now quite apparent that the Pretenders directly confront powerful emotions I haven't myself yet. I've often employed music as a therapeutic tool in easing grief and especially the unresolved anger I've begun to feel -- and hitherto repressed, like the associated memories, since the anger seems so irrational -- about certain events in my life.
The repression went so far there are relatively recent chunks of my life I was unable to remember, even while in analysis, and when others spoke to me of those times it evoked only the haziest of recollections I could agree on, while pretending that they didn't sometimes make me feel inexplicably uneasy.
This is no place to launch into a hypothesis that the manic-depressive illness is in itself partly the result of shoving intolerable pain related to experience so deep down that it manifests itself in cyclical form. I have no idea if that's true, but I do know that I must go on taking the lid off the box and find out what's inside it if there is to be any real healing. I know also that analysis in itself won't do the trick. Music, however, will certainly help.
There's a pattern to my listening that started meditatively slowing me down ages ago and brought me eventually to Chrissie Hynde. It has found me writing about the music and words of people who confront worldly realities and do it outstandingly well and those who deal in what I've called the Dreamtime, sharing in music the depths of their natures that are hard to express in other arts. Such musicians -- many actually do both -- appear to "go places" in which we too are invited to discover an innate wealth of enriching, life-enhancing resources.
Up against life from all angles
With these two notions in mind, what at first seemed like an eternity of weeks to recover from a brush with death and self-destruction from within, feeling instead like someone who escaped an external accident that struck in March, now feels like no time at all.
Hynde's achievement on 'Loose Screw' is to devote virtually a whole album to songs about heartbreak, tackled from numerous angles. So this is "easy listening"? Musically, Hynde is right. Lyrically it's far more challenging and a good place to start when you've taken some tough medicine of your own.
When Hynde bluntly asserts that 'Nothing Breaks Like a Heart', we know the woman's right and even that the best cure can be to pick up the pieces and risk heartbreak all over again, once we feel we're ready to do so, but my own area of expertise has often been in burying my own experiences of heartbreak so effectively that the whole lot needed to begin to surface, thus enabling me to go happily on the way I initially felt I could at the turn of a very good year.
Moreover the sense of distortion in time that has been so strong is, I'm now sure, no simple matter of getting used to a new emotional palette, but of doing the things that send people to therapists in the first place. The next time I see mine is the moment to tell him I've realised that I'm living in more than one time at once, with people as I know them today and the returning memories of how things were, which will screw up my present perspective until I've dealt with them.
I've heard others express the feeling I once did to my doctor friend, that it would be nice to "get to the middle of the onion, know what's in it and be sure that nothing else will come back to haunt me." His was the wisest of possible replies to such wishful thinking: "That onion of yours, you'll never get to the middle. There isn't one, Nick. The onion is life itself and that you can go exploring in your habitual ways, particularly in what you are writing about music."
There are big differences between 'Loose Screw', full of songs about deceit and lies, with telling details of turmoil in marriage and other love relationships, the sense of betrayal and breach of trust, and the album made long ago, in 1984, 'Learning to Crawl'. Back then, the Pretenders bent an ear to the punk sound on the one hand and the Top of the Pops on the other. They're both very good, solid records.
The reggae influence on 'Loose Screw' is unmistakable if the names of Bob Marley and his kind mean anything, but nobody comes all the way from Mars to read my repeated attempts in 'Learning to Crawl'. This name, despite the edge of sadness after a time of tragedies, was also a lovely one for Pretenders to give the mid-1980s album with several great songs in many styles, each like somebody putting on new clothes and yet still essentially themselves, and has to be a "rock classic". Practised critics handle the vocabulary of the blues, jazz leanings, the country sound and countless techniques put readily at everybody's disposal by technology with misleading ease when it comes to appreciating how individual songs get put together.
For me, such albums are an incentive to do some homework in those building blocks, revising the music lessons learned early in life and no longer taking them for granted, any more than I can for some while to come the simplest stuff of daily existence. The people who are compiling what they regard as the "Essentials" of 20th century popular music at what is still a "new" French iTunes store have included the Pretenders in a short list, along with the Rolling Stones and other music for Martian tourists in search of a guide.
Songs on 'Learning to Crawl', performed by a band that had long done so musically, are serious in their lyrical content, while the sound can be tremendously playful. It is playable too -- and there's a band in Britain called the Pretend Pretenders -- but not without considerable skill. Each track has its complexities and richness.
'Watching the Clothes' is a fun song about somebody having no fun at all. It's horrible to feel young on a Saturday night and sit in the launderette. I once wrote that women must do songs about washing machines. Maybe there are many. In this one, you can hear the machine, because the band performs it, getting slow and then faster, while Hynde tumbles the words out of soap powder ads around.
'Learning to Crawl' has hits on it in two senses, chart hits and right-on-the-nail hits about the good and bad times in normal life, a process in which we reconsider our values when things go wrong. Songs that will stay the course of the decades often remind us of the invaluably simple truths.
While the music of the Pretenders has always more or less been in the pop mainstream, adapting with it, it has been highly influential on other musicians as well as influenced, ever strong on the melody and often hard in the rocking. I repeatedly listened to these two albums, but June 2006 is the month the band, which already released its greatest hits at the turn of the century, has decided it's time to offer a richer retrospective.
If you can afford it, reviews haven't begun to grow on the trees yet. The retrospective looks comprehensive. What's available is a five-album set called 'Pirate Radio', with a wealth of DVD material to round it off.
Whoever is on the turntable at a given moment, it's reassuring to know I can always trust the final arbiter: my Inner Shaman. He never gets mad when people suggest I accept some very hard realities and I wouldn't go as far as Hynde, remembering things, as to tell anybody "If you'd been in the S.S. in '43 / you'd have been kicked out for cruelty" ('I Hurt You'), but the woman is an expert in the school of hard knocks. An Inner Shaman knows that people who deal with these in positive ways and encourage others to do the same are right.
Both these Pretenders albums are the kind I'd like almost just on principle because I enjoy tunes that people can simply call "music" without scratching their heads hard about categories for it beyond "popular". We need reminders of simplicity and the real fun in play. It's only too easy for people to confuse "simplicity" with "ease", and occasionally with stupidity.
Hynde protests strongly about reality in 'My City was Gone', a mid-1980s return to Ohio in a song about finding out what uncaring authorities did to much-loved farmland and the towns of her youth. She spits out a word of the day, "muzak", for something that isn't going to change any time soon, however much we hate heartless speed control pap on loudspeakers in our supermarkets.
Hynde doesn't swear much in her songs, but she does occasionally on 'Loose Screw', to telling effect when she's singing about people in worlds of deception ('Time the Avenger') and stuck in or out of relationships gone awry. Some reviewers don't think the reggae twist does much, others like it a lot, I'm one of the latter who enjoys hearing bands engage in such play with popular styles when they can pull it off. The Pretenders have to be in real doldrums to be bad at anything they do.
The rest is largely a question of taste. I've got my own life-situation categories for CDs. These overlap, but 'Loose Screw' fits into a "tough love" one as well as some of the others. Vocal sound gets distorted ('Lie to Me') when people are, it can be hard to tell bad from good ('Kinda Nice, I Like It'), and Hynde is somebody you can identify with while handling stuff that gets mean and twisted, along with the decent.
 The iTMS version of 'Loose Screw' offers two bonuses. In 'Complicada', Hynde ironically sings about being a 'Complex Person' in Spanish, while track 14 takes the "tough love" theme and makes of it a sweet surprise. Hynde gave herself a treat and gives us one with a marked change of genre in her cover of the classic 'I Wish You Love' mentioned in the last log entry. Were it only a cover, it would be a fine one, but there's a reason the number lasts more than 10 minutes, which is too good to disclose.
Being at a time again to tackle past mistakes and deception, partly in the way the French give the second word the extra meaning of "disappointment", it's good news to listen to somebody else's 'Loose Screw' when the album is also about reconciliation.
From the earlier album, 'Thumbelina', a trans-American travel tale, is the kind of song that slides into an iMix I'm doing on aspects of the parent-child relationship. I have many reasons to think about parents and children, partly related to what's happening in me, now that I know about it, and partly for outgoing motives.
Gone are more of my own pretences. I need to reappraise the broad shelves of my life's music library, where there is much that I'd like to hear again as if for the first time. There's nothing more simple than realising that you can make do with what you already have got, like a band that takes the best in what's around them forwards.
Roll on, Pretenders.
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