Chrissie Hynde, minus the Pretenders = ‘Fidelity!’
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Chrissie Hynde will put out her first full-fledged album apart from the Pretenders next month, but don’t call it a solo project.
Hynde has partnered with Welsh singer and songwriter JP Jones on “Fidelity!,” which will be released Aug. 24. It’s credited to JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys, and the album is full of bracing rock that Pretenders fans will recognize, as well as some country touches that may surprise those who’ve heard Hynde’s professed aversion to country music over the years.
The album in a sense documents the budding relationship between Hynde, the 58-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, and Jones, who is in his 20s. The 30-something year age gap between them figures into the lead-off track, “Perfect Lover,” in which Hynde sings, “I’ve found my perfect lover but he’s only half my age/He was learning how to stand when I was wearing my first wedding band.”
Word is they met randomly at a party in London and not long after took a trip together to Cuba, where they wrote most of the songs.
“It wasn’t an easy album to make emotionally,” Hynde wrote on their MySpace page, “but writing and singing together was like falling off a log -- the music was pouring out of us. We wrote to each other, about each other, with each other and for each other.”
Hynde and Jones, who played their first gig together in April at Bardot in Hollywood, will make an appearance at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles on Aug. 23 as part of the museum’s “The Drop” series highlighting noteworthy new releases.
The museum’s executive director, Robert Santelli, will interview them, and they are then expected to play a few songs from the album. Tickets will go on sale next week, but an on-sale date hasn’t been finalized.
-- Randy Lewis
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