Chrissie Hynde and JP Jones show how to bridge a generation gap with their new CD.
Rock goddess Chrissie Hynde finally found her perfect lover 18 months ago. Just one problem: He’s nearly half her age and, oh yeah, he wants to have kids — not exactly in the cards for a 58-year-old classic rocker who already has two grown daughters from a pair of previous marriages.
“He was learning how to stand/when I was wearing my first wedding band,” Hynde sings about the 32-year-old JP Jones, in a song called — what else? — “Perfect Lover.”
Not wanting to let all that inspiration, angst and chemistry go to waste, Hynde formed a band with the talented, raspy-voiced Welsh songwriter. The result? The first album Hynde has recorded outside her legendary Pretenders brand. JP, Chrissie and the Fairground Boys issued their self-titled debut this week, a disk filled with brave, sad and sometimes funny songs about this star-crossed love, sung by the very couple trapped in its cross hairs.
Just how weird is it to be singing all these songs that reveal your life together?
Chrissie: In retrospect, the backstory is an extremely awkward one to keep talking about. But what can we do about it now? It’s out there.
How did you two meet?
JP: We were both totally inebriated.
Chrissie: I was standing there in a bar where there was this Congolese art party going on. JP walked up to me and said, “Hey, you’re Chrissie.”
JP: I was a big fan. I had a poster of her on my wall at school. But she was really normal when I met her.
Chrissie: It was really noisy in that bar and I had to go on tour the next day with the Pretenders, so we just had a little conversation and I said, “Look, if you want to talk, call me sometime.” Then he started sending me songs he’d written. And I was blown away by them.
I understand you were also taken with the fact that JP grew up by an old-fashioned fairground in Wales.
Chrissie: The idea of the fairground is extremely romantic to me. I’ve always associated them with fun and escape. He doesn’t understand how exotic a Welsh guy from a fairground is to an American.
JP: The idea of a Welshman being exotic is hysterical to me. This is Chrissie’s perspective.
Chrissie: Well, remember, Chrissie is a girl from Ohio and she has a pretty good take on what waitresses and divorcees find exotic.
To make your story together even more unusual, you wound up writing the songs together in Havana. How did you wind up there?
JP: Chrissie had just come off tour and one day she said to me, “Hey, do you want to go to Cuba?” We really didn’t know each other very well then. We had hung out a bit and texted a lot. But I said yeah. So we went and I brought a guitar and we sat on a bed and looked at each other and wrote songs to each other. We were writing on napkins in restaurants. It was meant to be a holiday and we came back with the core of the album.
Chrissie: We were writing songs to please each other. It was like writing a personal letter. Of course, we were disappointed in the way the relationship would obviously pan out, with me being 30 years older. A future of pushing Granny around in a wheelchair isn’t what a young man would be looking for. I’d marry him in a New York minute
— if I were 28. But the way I can be with him is through this kind of musical journey. We started writing all these songs about what couldn’t be.
It’s so poignant to listen to, and to watch when you play live.
JP: We’ve had some people crying in their beers. But we don’t want to bum people out with this. We want people to see the comedic side, too.
Chrissie: It can get maudlin sometimes, singing these heartbreaking songs with the guy that they’re about. Some nights it’s brutal. It’s also kind of voyeuristic and strange. But we’re certainly not doing anything to encourage people to be fascinated. I mean, we’re as confused about it as the audience is. People are looking to us to see how we are getting along; what do we feel? But we don’t even know ourselves. We’re actually living this thing.
How much of what we hear on the album is literal, and how much poetic license?
JP: Everything is the truth — just using metaphors.
Chrissie: This may sound incredibly pretentious, but as the years drag on I see that people who are, let’s say, creative, do think differently than a lot of other people. One thing I’ve noticed with songwriters is there’s often an element of deep intuition, almost to the point of being psychic.
There’s a certain amount of prophecy in songs. Like when JP said he was from a fairground. I don’t think most people would have stood up at attention the way I did. But as I said, all my life I’ve had this thing about fairgrounds. After I met JP, I began to wonder if maybe that’s why I always had that thing to begin with. Maybe it was all about him.
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