CoronaVinyl Day 79 (Ohio): Learning to Crawl by The Pretenders

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is Ohio, and I'm going with The Pretenders and their third studio album, 1984's Learning to Crawl.  While the band had various lineup changes over the years and not everyone was from Ohio, lead singer Chrissie Hynde is from Akron, Ohio, and several of her songs over the years -- including "My City Was Gone" on this album -- were inspired by her hometown and home state.  So that's good enough for me.

Named because lead singer and main songwriter Chrissie Hynde's daughter was, in fact, learning to crawl at the time, the album was a bittersweet one.  The band had released their first two albums in 1980 and 1981, respectively, and both did very well, charting in the Top 10 on the album charts in both the U.S. and the UK (and several other countries).  However, in June 1982, bassist Pete Farndon was fired from the band, and then two days later, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott died of a cocaine overdose.  Less than a year later, Farndon drowned in his bathtub while high on heroin.

Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers recruited some other musicians to play on a few tracks that would eventually end up on Learning to Crawl, before Robbie McIntosh (guitar) and Malcolm Foster (bass) were invited to join the band to make it a quartet again and to finish the rest of the tracks on the album.

I suppose you could classify Learning to Crawl as new wave, but it's a little more rocking than what I would consider new wave -- and there aren't synthesizers.  I would just categorize it as rock and roll, with a little alternative tinge.  Whatever you want to call it, it worked.  Learning to Crawl is the band's highest-charting album to date on the Billboard album chart, reaching #5.  It also features three Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 -- "Back on the Chain Gang" (#5, making it the band's first Top 10 hit in the U.S.), "Middle of the Road" (#19), and "Show Me" (#28) -- as well as several of the band's other most enduring songs, like "My City Was Gone," their cover of The Persuaders' 1971 soul hit "Thin Line Between Love and Hate," and the haunting "2000 Miles," which is now generally considered a Christmas song, but was written by Hynde for Honeyman-Scott after his death.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Middle of the Road"
This is probably my favorite Pretenders song.  It's a catchy, fast-paced ditty, with those subversively enticing "ooh-ooh-ooh-ooooh-oohs," a nice rockabilly-ish guitar solo from McIntosh, and a great harmonica solo from Hynde to finish the song off.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "2000 Miles"
I'm a sucker for holiday music, and while this really wasn't meant to be a Christmas song, it does reference Christmastime.  The fade in makes it feel like you're swooping into a church on Christmas Eve (or the church of rock and roll, anyway).  Knowing that Hynde wrote it in honor of Honeyman-Scott's death makes the song and its lyrics of longing more meaningful and more universal.