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Survival can bring a kind of smugness, a moral certainty that there is an absolute code to obey and a single straight path to follow. Hynde's songs never carry a hint of this. She may have forced a land of necessary rapprochement with her recklessness, but the fire still burns bright—perhaps against the night. She speaks intensely of Natalie, and of "a real feeling of humanity that I hadn't had before." But she also thinks often of a past that dwells persistently, inescapably in the present. "I think about death every day. Always. To me it's just reality. To not think about death is like living in your sleep." For the Pretenders, then, as for very few other bands today, music becomes quite literally a matter of life and death, a way, better than any other, of keeping wide awake.
—By Jay Cocks.
Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles