Pretenders – "Day After Day" (1981)

'Round and 'round and 'round we go

Just like yesterday

The Pretenders’ eponymous debut album was widely praised as one of the very best of its era.  It’s certainly one of the few albums I owned that I was happy to listen to straight through.  

Actually, I always skipped “Stop Your Sobbing” – the one song on that record that Chrissie Hynde didn’t write.  That song was written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, the father of Hynde’s only child.  (He wrote a lot of great songs, but “Stop Your Sobbing” isn’t one of them.)  

Every other song on that first album was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.  But in the course of deciding which Pretenders’ songs deserved to be in the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME, I discovered that the band’s second album – which was titled Pretenders II – was even better: 

I would go so far as to say that Pretenders II is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty f*ckin’ awesome.

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Chrissie Hynde wrote a lot of great songs, most of which are about what happens when males and females couple.  

“Day After Day” is an exception.  It doesn’t tell the story of un homme et une femme – it’s a song about what it’s like to be a successful rock ’n’ roll band.

A lot of groups have released records about the head-spinning experience of life on the road – “Travelin’ Band” by Creedence, “We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad, and “Torn and Frayed” by the Stones are just a few examples – but I think “Day After Day” is one of the best.

The promotional video that was made for it shows the group deplaning from a commuter turboprop in Santa Barbara and climbing into limousines for a drive to an outdoor concert venue, where they pretend to rehearse as the cameras roll.  (Hynde is one of the more convincing lip-synchers I’ve ever seen.)

The second half of the video shows them returning to the same venue later that night and taking the stage to perform.  

I don’t know why drummer Martin Chambers is playing while wearing long underwear.  But I do know that his sideburns were m-o-n-e-y!

Click here to watch the “Day After Day” video.  (I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like the band is having a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good time.)

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I thought I would be able to stop with three Pretenders tracks, but it looks like I’m going to have to feature at least five Chrissie Hynde-penned songs before I can move on.  

No promises that I’ll be able to stop after five – every time I hit Youtube and start listening to Pretenders tracks, my list of potential hall of fame songs grows longer.

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Click here to listen to the album version of “Day After Day.”  (The promotional video mentioned above uses the single version of the song, which ends differently.)

And click below to buy the record from Amazon: