This song is about a man who gives up his dreams and lives a life of routine monotony in order to accumulate money. He is the pretender.
In a 1997 interview with Mojo magazine, Browne said of this song: "I'm a big fan of ambiguity and its bountiful rewards, and 'The Pretender' is two things at once. It's that person in all of us that has a higher ideal, and the part that has settled for compromise - like Truffaut says, there's the movie you set out to make, and there's the one you settle for. But in a more serious way, 'The Pretender' is about '60s idealism, the idea of life being about love and brotherhood, justice, social change and enlightenment, those concepts we were flooded with as our generation hit its stride; and how, later, we settled for something quite different. So when I say 'Say a prayer for The Pretender,' I'm talking about those people who are trying to convince themselves that there really was nothing to that idealism."
Browne wrote this song after tending to a person with schizophrenia. "We spent about two or three days trying to get this guy help," he told Rolling Stone in 2014. "He disappeared once, and we found him down the street, sitting in the living room of a Latino family, smoking a cigarette and acing like he belonged there, like nothing was wrong. He was faking it, pretending to belong. I wouldn't say 'The Pretender' came out of that story, but the idea is there: that we're pretending to go along with something that isn't quite where we belong, a default version of reality, with a job and a house."
That's David Crosby and Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young) on harmony vocals. Like Browne, they were part of the Laurel Canyon scene in California; all three were romantically linked to Joni Mitchell at one time or another.
Jeff Porcaro, later of Toto, was the drummer on the track. The other musicians were:
Fred Tackett - guitars
Leeland Sklar - bass
Craig Doerge - piano
"The Pretender" is the title track to Jackson Browne's fourth album, made at a challenging time for the singer. After giving birth to their son Ethan in 1973, Phyllis Major, whom Browne married in 1975, fell into a depression, and she died by suicide in March 1976. Browne stopped work on the album for a few months but finished it in time for release in November.
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This was the second (and last) single released from the album, following "
Here Come Those Tears Again." Neither song reached lofty heights on the charts, but Browne's audience was an album-buying crowd, and they scooped up over 3 million copies, giving him his commercial breakthrough. Throughout his career, Browne focused on complete albums, even in the age of streaming. His biggest chart hit, "
Somebody's Baby," he wrote for the
Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack.
Browne had a very clear idea of what he wanted his songs to sound like, so he acted as his own producer on his first three albums. For The Pretender, he changed course and brought in Bruce Springsteen's producer Jon Landau in that role. The change of heart came when Browne produced Warren Zevon's self-titled 1976 album; he saw the value of having another set of ears in the studio.
A conceptual antecedent is the 1956 doo-wop classic "
The Great Pretender" by The Platters. In that song, the singer is the pretender, acting like he's feeling fine but truly shattered by heartbreak.
This appears on the soundtrack of the 1995 movie Mr. Holland's Opus.
Browne performed this song and "
Running On Empty" when he was the musical guest on
Saturday Night Live September 24, 1977.
Browne would often let his songs marinate for a while before he recorded them; that was the case here. "'The Pretender' took a long time," he told Rolling Stone in 2008. "It's not that I worked on it every day; I was reluctant to finish it before I had gotten all there was out of it. Songwriting is a search. Most of my songs set up a bunch of questions, and it takes a while to answer them."
The song has remained relevant through the decades and is one the ones Browne plays most often at concerts. Looking back on the song in 2015, he told Mojo magazine: "It's grappling with the question of whether the life you're living is the life you thought you were heading for. 'The Pretender' is an open question: Do you find life's best qualities by having children and a job, or in tearing those things down?"
