Chrissie Hynde Talks New Album, Fairgrounds, Record-Label Greed

With headlining shows by Soundgarden, Green Day and Jimmy Cliff, Lollapalooza 2010 saw its share of returning alumni this year. Few of those rock ‘n’ roll vets played mid-afternoon sets to a crowd of dancing five-year-olds, though. Enter Chrissie Hynde, who took over the Kidzapalooza Stage to unveil her newest project: JP, Chrissie and the Fairground Boys.

Hynde’s new right-hand-man is JP Jones, a Welsh-born songwriter and former frontman of the U.K. buzz band Grace. The pair first crossed paths in a bar, where they bonded over a mutual appreciation for fairgrounds. Before long, they’d struck up an unlikely romance and musical partnership. While taking an impulsive trip to Cuba, the two began writing songs together, eventually returning home with an album’s worth of tortured love songs and Americana-tinged rockers.

Two years later, it looks like the romance has ended. But Hynde and Jones, who’re separated by a 30-year age gap, are still loyal bandmates, and they took some time after their Lollapalooza performance to talk with Paste about their new album, which was released on Tuesday. Patrick Murdoch, the duo’s touring guitarist, also joined the conversation.

Paste: How’d the show go?
JP Jones: It was great but short. We didn’t have the rest of the band with us, so we did an acoustic set with Patrick.
Chrissie Hynde: We haven’t played with a full band yet. We’ll start in September.
Jones: It’s just the acoustic stuff right now, for promo gigs.
Hynde: It almost came about my accident, actually. JP had suggested we go work in L.A., so we thought about it and it just felt right. We went there and within weeks, we had gigs. Patrick came over from the UK to hang out for awhile—he had some air miles—and as soon as he got here, we started playing with him. Bookstores, bowling alleys… anyone that would have us, really. The acoustic thing wasn’t always intended as the way we wanted to showcase ourselves, but it’s been really good for us. We’re playing quietly and we can hear each other.

Paste: It sounds like things are developing organically.
Jones: That’s right.

Paste: Was the album organic as well?
Jones: Totally. It wasn’t planned at all. Chrissie and I met, we hung out, she asked, “Do you want to go to Cuba?” and I said I did. We brought guitars with us and wrote songs about how we felt about each other, the situation, the circumstances of our relationship. It happened fast.
Hynde: Playing with the Pretenders… I mean, I would never have gone off to do a solo thing. I’m not a solo guy. I like playing with bands. So I was just doing my thing, but then I met JP and I was so impressed with his songwriting. He invited me to write with him and that went really well. He had all these guys that he’d worked with. Patrick had been in Grace, JP’s former band, and Patrick had also been in a band called Big Linda, whose singer had just left…
Patrick Murdoch: That’s why I went on holiday in L.A.!
Hynde: …so we went in with the Big Linda boys and another songwriting partner, and we recorded the album.

Paste: What were your impressions when you heard JP play for the first time?
Hynde: He sent me some demos. I thought his songwriting had real character and was quite unusual. He obviously wrote really quickly, so the stuff came out really naturally. I was totally impressed with his voice. He has an amazing voice; there’s a lot of exploration to be done with that voice. So for me, it was like a gift from Providence.

Paste: Was the album collaborative, then, or were you just playing off of each other’s own material?
Jones: No, no, no, we wrote everything together. We wrote the songs to each other, for each other.
Hynde: We haven’t even known each other for two years yet. It happened real quickly.

Paste: What does the record sound like? Sparse? Lush?
Jones: It’s live. We did it completely live. We tidied it up afterwards with some background vocals, and we redid some guitar parts because we’re not the best players…
Hynde: We’re not Patrick Murdoch.
Jones: …And then we gave it to Bob Clearmountain to mix it. He’s done a lot of mixing for Chrissie before, and he just turned it into an epic live album.
Hynde: JP grew up on a fairground; his mother worked on one, and so did he. He mentioned that to me when we first met in this bar, and that really appealed to me. I’ve always had a thing for fairgrounds. And this whole album has that fairground feel to it, this timelessness, this gypsy feeling. When I see those occult images and lights of a fairground, it gives me these waves of eternal feeling. I don’t think you can really say what year this album was made.

Paste: The album comes out later this month. What happens once it’s released? You hit the road with a full band?
Murdoch: Yeah, the rest of the band I was in before, Big Linda, will sort of constitute the rhythm section.
Jones: We’re doing an acoustic trio tour at the end of this month with Lucinda Williams, and then we’re coming out to Georgia to start a seven-to-eight week tour of the States with the full band.
Hynde: It just feels good in America right now. It feels like the industry has collapsed. The labels and everything else have destroyed themselves with their own greed. I like that.
Jones: Which is why we’re releasing the album on our own label. It’s called La Mina—means “the mind.”
Hynde: I think it’s just a really fertile time. You’ve got all this reality television stuff, all these contests for people who possibly aren’t very talented and are being judged by people who have no taste. Everyone’s watching that, and I think that’s a great breeding ground for bands. Because there are gonna be a million kids out there saying, “This is shit,” and that’s when you go into your basement with your guitar and start playing. That’s when you say, “Fuck it, I’m not gonna sit around criticizing; I have to show that I can do better than that.”
So I hope your magazine continues, because Paste is one of the only good music magazines, in my estimation. I think it’s gonna be an interesting time for anything related to music. We can all feel this surge of real corporate death. It’s all coming back to small, regional, individual stuff.
Jones: My whole time playing with Grace in Britian, the people were pushing for us to write big radio hits. To get a good response for this new project… People obviously want this kind of thing. I think people are saturated and tired of being force-fed.
Hynde: They’re tired of being conned by music that’s fake. With technology the way it is, I could choose six people at random right now and go make a really good record. I could make it sound like anything. I think there’s a lot of people right now who are rebelling against that, and they feel like they have to make real music. It happens every 10 years. Right when you think, “Oh no, it’s over, it’s all synthesizers now,” there’s a great big surge in guitar sales.

Paste: And now you’re in on the ground floor with a new project.
Hynde: That’s what’s so cool about it. This is the first real show we’ve done other than bookstores and bowling alleys. Our first real show is at Lollapalooza, playing for five-year-olds with their parents. I like that.