The All-Timers #6: Jackson Browne's "The Pretender"

In this series, I write about one of my all-time favorite songs. There's no rhyme or reason to the order. Check out past editions here.

Are you aware of Jackson Browne's reputation as a ladykiller? Regardless of your familiarity with his music, you should be. Just look at him in his prime. You could crack an egg on that jawline. Those eyes emit equally debilitating doses of soulful softness and deep, mysterious passion.

Evidence of Browne's innate animal magnetism abounds in songs by his contemporaries. He wrote "These Days" at 16, and when he traveled to New York to lay down some demos a year or two later, Nico, the Velvet Underground's infamously icy German co-vocalist, was so enamored with the laid-back Californian (a decade her junior) that she called dibs on him at first sight and demanded that he play guitar on a version of the song for her debut solo album. Joni Mitchell, another towering talent who no doubt cowed suitor after suitor, wrote "Car On A Hill" about Browne standing her up, after which she was so distraught that she allegedly "staged a suicide attempt." Browne's close friend, collaborator, and beneficiary Warren Zevon found the dissonance between Browne's effect on women and his forlorn folk-rock so funny (or irritating?) that he wrote the bitingly sarcastic "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" about it.

Browne's teenaged demos quickly netted him a deal with David Geffen's Asylum Records (making him labelmates with Mitchell for most of the '70s). His first three albums were instrumental in popularizing the Laurel Canyon sound of the post-hippie early '70s, defined by a decreased interest in wild psychedelia, an emphasis on introspection, and mainstream AM stations' acclimation to more easily palatable "rock" music. By 1974's supremely brooding Late for the Sky, it was easy to see where Zevon was coming from. If Browne's looks weren't enough, his proto-John Mayer penchant for weepy ballads that somehow also function as panty-droppers cemented him as a generational heartthrob.

But then, right at the peak of his stolen sadboy valor, Browne faced a tragedy that was actually worth lamenting. In 1975, he married model Phyllis Major (who, as legend has it, he was with on the "Car On A Hill" night). They already had a son together, born in '73. In March '76, as Browne was working on his next album, Major died of a barbiturate overdose that was ruled a suicide. That November's The Pretender is peppered with meditations on death and single parenthood, namely "Here Come Those Tears Again," which Browne partially based on lyrics written by Major's mother.

It's hard to find traces of that specific sorrow in the album-closing title track. "The Pretender" is a complex song—its ambitious combination of multiple distinct movements is impressive, but it's Browne's conflicted, evocative, universal lyrics that separate it from the one-note weepers that made him an icon.

The initial read is also the most broadly impactful one. This is an era-defining anthem. What The Who's "My Generation" was to UK Mods in the mid-'60s, what Creedence's "Fortunate Son" was to Vietnam, what Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was to Gen X, what LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" was to Millennials stricken with premature nostalgia—that's what "The Pretender" was for Jimmy Carter-era Boomers staring down the 10th anniversary of the famed "Summer of Love."

There's no better illustration of the Laurel Canyon scene's aforementioned leveling out of the late '60s' countercultural heights. The dream is over, Browne's narrator urges, Time to pay the bills. If I collected hard copies of all of the novels, essays, nonfiction books, albums, documentaries, and feature films that also attempt to explain this mass-scale generational transition, I wouldn't be able to walk two inches in my apartment. Save yourself the trouble though—nothing quite nails it like these six minutes.

I'm resisting the urge to do a line-by-line analysis of "The Pretender"—though worthwhile, no one wants to read all of that. But allow me to get my feet just a tiny bit damp. The song's three verses—two at the start, the third after a blooming tapestry of pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge—follow a similar format: describe the day-to-day life of a wage worker in terms either concrete, abstract, or even romantic, then cap it off with the line "Get up and do it again." Whether it's the mundane trappings of suburban life, the death of youthful idealism, or the solace of domestic partnership, it's all a ceaseless loop.

"Caught between the longing for love/And the struggle for the legal tender," Browne and his accompanying Greek chorus sing on the surging pre-chorus. By '76 it was clear that the Haight-Ashbury vision of each new day offering unfamiliar adventures, lovers, mind-expanding substances, and egalitarian utopias was a fleeting fantasy that proved either unsustainable or downright destructive. Even those few who found a way to structure their adult lives around following The Dead on tour every summer had to fund their lifestyles. The radio may have changed, fashion may have gotten groovier, Nixon was long gone, but the Flower Children had to make peace with returning to a world that still largely resembled the one they inherited from their parents, the one they so desperately fought to escape, subvert, and evolve.

But ever since my parents ensured that I was intimately familiar with "The Pretender" from a very young age, I've found it impossible to view it as the sober reality check it unmistakably is on paper. There's hope, and not just for the titular character that Browne prays for in the chorus.

Most of the blame rests on the music—even without the disco-fluent arrangement and glistening production, the melodic backbone is so cheery that any cover version seeking to draw out the song's depressing undertones would have to transpose it to a different key. Add in composer David Campbell's uplifting canned strings and the gospel-y backing vocals, and it makes pop culture's return to moderate middle ground seem almost triumphant.

I'm honestly shocked that "The Pretender" has never (to my knowledge) joined the ranks of hits by left-leaning classic rockers that get misconstrued by right-wing politicians desperately seeking familiar bangers to play at their rallies. It seems to champion the return to family values and fiscal responsibility that Republicans have craved for years. It lacks an iota of the thinly-veiled sarcasm of "Born in the USA." What has saved it from this fate, I think, is an empathy that not only evades a hectoring tone, but also espouses a measured-but-optimistic vision that evolved from '60s idealism without completely forsaking it.

~~

Okay, time to come clean. The reason I'm writing about "The Pretender" now, with no anniversary or death news peg, is that I'm still struggling to justify why I chose this ostensibly depressing, politically problematic song for the first dance at my wedding two weeks ago. My wife and I debated about it for months. She graciously allowed me to soundtrack the entire day, from processionals/recessionals to the cocktail/dinner playlist to a three-hour-long mix for the dancefloor to the afterparty, and this was the only selection that she met with hesitation (that is, until I made an abrupt-but-determined point of closing out the night with Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling").

Obviously, the first dance is the single most important musical event of any wedding, and I treated it as such. It wasn't like, 'Hey, how about this Jackson Browne song you've never heard before?' We have a history with "The Pretender" that dates back to our earliest memories of each other. Maybe I was too young to fully grasp the song's overarching message, but nothing described how I felt at the time like an excerpt from the third verse:

I'm gonna find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
And we'll fill in the missing colors
In each other's paint-by-number dreams

A song that was already a shared link between my parents and me quickly took on new resonance as I formed the bond that came to define my adult life. Maybe the phrase "paint-by-number" was meant to disparage the cookie-cutter nature of the goals that define normies' lives, but to this day it's the only version of the "you complete me" cliché that captures the sensation of miraculously finding a person whose drastic differences perfectly complement your own distinct personality.

It's not rare to find joy in music that fundamentally opposes it. Black metal, emo, relentlessly violent trap, and sad-bastard country so often elicit a gleeful smile out of me when I'm in moods that can't tolerate anything remotely cheerful.

But "The Pretender" reminds me why I'm such a fiend for ambiguity in any art I consume. Life isn't entirely pain or bliss. Fairytale depictions of good and evil aren't real. It's easy for Millennial leftists like me to valorize the version of '60s radicalism that has been handed down to us, and villainize the actual participants' eventual pivot to Yuppie-ism. But when you're fortunate enough to truly love someone, or even to have loved someone, life's ceaseless parade of compromises, maturation, and selling out feels less like an unfair burden and more like another blank canvas to be filled in however you see fit.

If you need convincing that the rest of my wedding reception mix was much more upbeat and thematically appropriate, I uploaded it to Soundcloud:

BOI (Best Of Inbox) #38

Bb trickz & KARRAHBOOO - "Pharrell"

Location: Spain/Atlanta // Genre: sunny pop-rap // RIYL: chipmunk soul, former Lil Yachty protégées distancing themselves from him and immediately continuing to thrive // From: Sum'er Pack EP, out "soon"

EBK Jaaybo - "Pops Punch Me In"

Location: Stockton, CA // Genre: gothic NorCal street rap // RIYL: Mozzy, SOB RBE // From: The Reaper, out now

Fousheé - "100 bux"

Location: New Jersey // Genre: grungy R&B // RIYL: that brief moment in 2014 when SZA and Tinashe seemed one degree of separation away from FKA Twigs // From: Pointy Heights, out 9/13

Hank Heaven & Beach Bunny - "Beloved"

Location: Brooklyn/Chicago // Genre: twangy, laid-back hyperpop (if that's a thing?) // RIYL: Alex G, the last Soccer Mommy album, Hovvdy

Molina Feat. ML Buch - "Organs"

Location: Copenhagen // Genre: dark, spacey ambient pop // RIYL: an unholy mashup of the Drive and Donnie Darko soundtracks // From: When You Wake Up, out 10/11

Tanukichan Feat. Wisp - "It Gets Easier"

Location: Oakland/San Francisco // Genre: shoegaze-y alt-rock // RIYL: Hatchie, forgetting any preconceived opinions you might've had about Wisp (maybe that's just me) // From: Circles EP, out 9/20

That Kid - "Do It All Night"

Location: Denver // Genre: dance-pop // RIYL: gloriously cheesy late '90s/early '00s Euro-dance // From: TK Ultra, out now

All Inbox Infinity picks are available in playlist form via Apple Music and Spotify.