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List Price: $7.98Amazon.com's Price: $6.99 You Save: $0.99 (12%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0075596051323
Label: Elektra / Wea
Manufacturer: Elektra / Wea
Number Of Discs: 1
Publication Date: 1976
Publisher: Elektra / Wea
Release Date: October 25, 1990
Sales Rank: 1146
Studio: Elektra / Wea
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
A songwriting prodigy since his teens, Jackson Browne had already reached a zenith in confessional writing with 1974's Late for the Sky, a song cycle of his guitar and piano based anthems, reveries, and rockers, distilling themes of disillusionment, apocalypse, friendship, and fragile romances. Teaming with Bruce Springsteen's producer, Jon Landau, Browne himself clearly sought to up the ante with more epic settings, while Landau worked on pumping up the star's vocal attack. But personal tragedy, in the suicide of his partner and mother of his young son, cast an unplanned shadow across these songs, giving The Pretender a darker, heartbroken edge and an authentic, scarred toughness. Fatherhood, mortality, and resignation inform brilliant songs like "Your Bright Baby Blues" (featuring Lowell George's plangent slide guitar and vocal counterpoint), "Here Come Those Tears Again" (with Bonnie Raitt), and the prayerful, desolate "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate," but it's the title tune that remains the haunting highlight. --Sam Sutherland
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Who are you, when you wake up one day and realize that you are thinking more pragmatically than idealistically? The 28 y.o. Jackson Browne recorded "The Pretender" at that point in his life and gave us this brilliant album. There are still elements of introspection, lust and loneliness, that Jackson Browne is noted for writing about, but there's more going on here. Songs, like "The Fuse", and Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate" are Browne's perspective of Life's journey. "Daddy's Tune" is his wonderful reflection of the generational gap between him and his father."The only Child" is a sweet poem to his young son, trying to pass on his best words of wisdom. This song is thematically, similar to Bob Dylan's "Forever Young".
The album's title song, "The Pretender" is a masterpiece of song writing. Here, we are presented with the images of resignation to the realities of life and the day to day process of making a living. Remembering the dreams of his youth,"The Pretender" watches those dreams recede, while he, as Jackson Browne writes, "struggles for the legal tender".
While "Late for the Sky" is still my favorite Jackson Browne Album. "The Pretender" is a mature and extremely well crafted album, that sets him on the path to his next, and most commercially successful work,"Running on Empty".
Rating:  -
Musically, this is mostly more of the same monotonous soft-rock, but it's a cut above standard Jackson fare off the strength of two of his finest songs: "Here Come Those Tears Again", a mature look at the typical "come-and-go" relationship (though it's sadly doused in sappy country backup vocals), and particularly the title track, a cynical attack on suburban values that I think is my favorite of Jackson's songs. "Your Bright Baby Blues" also could've fit with these songs if it weren't so longwinded. And there are a couple songs that move beyond the soft-rock: while "Linda Paloma" is an awful flamenco song dominated by harpsichord, I like the fusion of hard-rock guitar and horns found on "Daddy's Tune". And even the typical soft-rock tracks are at least modestly engaging ("Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate", "The Fuse"). However, I can't give this anymore than a 3.5: Jackson's still not doing anything original, and other than the title track the lyrics are unimpressive as ever. So there's not a single moment on this album you've heard before, but you could do worse if you're looking for soft-rock.
Rating: -
Wonderful album. The musical poet is at work making his magic of
creating stories set to music. Easy to listen to and a great talent.
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If you have any doubts, you should know this is one of the great rock classics - one of the very best, sound a+, lyrics a++, and musical performance a+++
JB at his best.
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THE PRETENDER, along with JACKSON BROWNE, FOR EVERYMAN, LATE FOR THE SKY, and RUNNING ON EMPTY, is one of Jackson Browne's best albums. It features songs that cut to the very heart of the human soul, as well as railing against greed and materialism in the title track, a song which could teach valuable lessons to anyone who's ever told a young woman that she's overweight or called a classmate "freak", "nerd", or "loser." Other tunes on the album deal with the suicide of Browne's wife, which had occurred as he was writing for this one. This should be one of the first Jackson Browne albums you purchase anyway, but Browne's advocacies of sanctions against Indonesia in retaliation for that country's trumped-up drug-smuggling conviction of a young Australian tourist, as well as more funding for community policing, make all of Browne's 70s, 80s, and 90s albums essential purchases for both your ears AND your conscience.
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