Straight to the gut
Launched in 1983, Middle of the Road begins like a road trip car starting at daybreak. Like a blade sharpened by fatigue and resolve, Chrissie Hynde’s voice tears across the song. With a velocity that keeps the entire mechanism running, the harmonica cuts across the mix; the guitar bites; the drums hammer forward. The atmosphere is dusty, the hands are sweaty, and one feels as though the wheels are turning both literally and figuratively. The track clears the road and keeps it open for three straight minutes.
The Pretenders had just emerged from a trying period. Having lost two band members to drug overdoses, the band was slowly being rebuilt. Though this song seems to be a run across the wreckage rather than one of sadness. The arrangement on Learning to Crawl, the album this song comes from, appeared to be tighter and more experienced. Pregnant during the recording, Chrissie played guitar with an intensity that left no room for question. Because staying still is not an option, the song sounds like someone battling to stay moving.
Middle of the Road offers no tricks. The song operates on impulse. Every note, from the four-on-the-floor drumbeat to the piercing rhythm guitar and the harmonica that rips like a siren, is meant to activate the body and sustain the nerves’ edge. The manner the instruments link together has a torn accuracy. You hear a band with something to demonstrate yet no inclination to explain itself. Every note is sent right forward; never to the side.
In Middle of the Road, Chrissie Hynde takes a basic R&B format and, with new lyrics, delivers a brash, no-nonsense rocker that’s all about getting out there and mixing it up with the world.
(Charles M. Young, Musician, 1983)
This song came in the middle of the Reagan years, when MTV was changing the soundscape and elaborate production was becoming typical. Middle of the Road rejected polish. It sounds like it’s hungry, real, living. It caught something many felt but few were articulating: frustration, momentum, survival. Played loud, it drowns out uncertainty. played live, it became a statement. Hynde once claimed she picked up all she needed to know from seeing Iggy Pop perform barefoot and fearless. Every second of this song leaks that attitude.
Middle of the Road never fades. It remains in the blood. The grit in the voice, the restlessness in the rhythm, the sense that something needs to be done right now and this song could help accomplish it all holds up. The Pretenders went for the gut; they did not aim for a legacy here. That explains why the song sticks. Just a burst of strong energy etched into vinyl, no ornaments, no gimmicks.
