Chrissie Hynde happy to return to Pretenders ‘Alone’

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Chrissie Hynde and producer Dan Auerbach | JILL FURMANOVSKY PHOTO

Chrissie Hynde is the first to admit alone time can be a very good thing. For the past eight years, The Pretenders frontwoman has put the revered rock band on pause to devote time to a number of solo ambitions — the short-lived duet project JP, Chrissie & The Fairground Boys, her eponymous debut “Stockholm” and a biography, “Reckless: My Life as a Pretender,” which details her coming of age in 1970s London where she still lives today.

THE PRETENDERS Appearing with Stevie Nicks When: 7 p.m. Dec. 3 Where: United Center, 1901 W. Madison Tickets: $49.50-150 Info: ticketmaster.com

That platter of experiences have only made the comeback of The Pretenders even sweeter in 2016 with a new album, “Alone” that harkens back to the band’s 1980 debut and a tour with Stevie Nicks that also pits the band right back in its heyday era. Even though the current iteration is really just the 65-year-old on her own after the untimely deaths of original members guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon early on and the more recent departure of drummer Martin Chambers.

“I just got so tired of talking about defending The Pretenders name with all the ongoing lineup changes. And sometimes you just to get your head into something else to stay inspired and stimulated,” Hynde says of her motive in trying to break out on her own. “But anyone who is a singer of a band also inherits this kind of position of having to be the spokesman, so I figured I just had to do what I had to do to keep the band going.”

She was also inspired by Dan Auerbach, who produced “Alone” and had carved a similar path by starting out in The Black Keys and branching out into side dish The Arcs and a swath of studio credits.

“He’s on such a roll that guy, and I was absolutely thrilled that he agreed to work with me,” Hynde admits. Though the two had met in passing “like I meet everyone else in this business,” says Hynde, she and Auerbach also both originally hail from the music breeding grounds of Akron, Ohio and had an easy time assimilating during recording at his Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville. While Auerbach’s touches are evident in many nooks of “Alone,” his gift was also allowing the natural girth of The Pretenders to shine through with all the characteristic hooks and melodies, Hynde’s buoying voice (preserved by quitting smoking, she says) and her heart-on-sleeve songwriting that together have made the band famous.

“All of my songs are always autobiographical, and I kind of wish they weren’t,” admits Hynde of the between-the-lines inferences on songs like the title track praising her own sense of solitude, “Roadie Man” in homage to the “whole subculture” of crew behind the scenes and the alluring “Let’s Get Lost” about a person she cares not to name, saying, “I wish I was more of a storyteller, but I’m not.”

That sentiment is hard to reckon with for anyone who may have read her biography, which came out in 2015. It tells of a brazen young Hynde, enamored with The Beatles, leaving her studies at Kent State (during the time of the infamous riots) and embarking on a mission to London to find her way in the rock echelon. Here she intersected with Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop, and The Kinks’ Ray Davies (with whom she shares a daughter) and had a brief stint at rock rag NME before finding her eventual Pretenders bandmates.

“You get to a certain age and you know you’re halfway through your life or more, and you kind of want to put the past behind you and figure out how to move forward without the burden of unfinished business,” says Hynde of choosing to write her bio, which she calls ‘Chrissie Hynde light.’ In fact the book ends in 1983 right before The Pretenders really caught steam.

“I didn’t really go into anything dark, and I didn’t go much into people because I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she admits, empathetic with the idea of not wanting to be a household name. “It’s the last thing I ever wanted. I just don’t want anyone to have an opinion of me. The only time I want to be recognized is when I’m standing on a stage with my band.”

What keeps her going, Hynde says, is the music, especially feeling a duty at a time when she feels there is an absence of new bands forming. “I don’t know what happened over the last 20 years. It all went into this kind of singer-songwriter phase. But I sense that and hope that more people will start getting in bands,” she says, nudging at the greater picture. “In 20 years, all of us will be gone. We’re in what I call ‘The End of an Era era’ and someone else now has to step up.”

Selena Fragassi is a freelance music writer.

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