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Chrissie Hynde is madly in love with her record collection, and doing covers of some of the songs she holds dear have played almost as big a part in her career as her own compositions. With recordings such as The Kinks’ Stop Your Sobbing with The Pretenders and Sonny & Cher’s 60s hit I Got You Babe with UB40, and her 2019 solo covers album Valve Bone Woe, she’s wrapped other people’s stories in her velvety, incorruptibly cool voice over the years and made them her own.
Duets Special, then, was all but inevitable; it’s just a surprise that it didn’t happen sooner. Comprising sparse versions of some old karaoke classics alongside deeper dives, it’s a late-night, stripped-back session that stays in the slow lane and indulges in the songwriting.
Elvis is represented twice: Always On My Mind with Rufus Wainright, whose high, torch-singer voice is a lovely contrast to Hynde’s impeccably warm tone, and the much, much covered I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You has a weary sadness to it when she’s teamed with Mark Lanegan – the fact that they never met in real life heightening the poignancy. Billy Paul’s Me And Mrs Jones features a smooth, sultry and soulful k.d. lang, and with Brandon Flowers on a slightly over-faithful take on 10cc’s I’m Not In Love… well, they do what they can with the pretty cringeworthy source material.
It’s some of the less obvious choices, though, that produce the magic. Not many people would touch Morrissey with a bargepole these days, but the bold choice of his First Of The Gang To Die is one of the livelier moments, Hynde and Cat Power revelling in the melodrama of the original.
John Lennon hated The Beatles’ It’s Only Love, but here Hynde and Julian Lennon give it the love it deserves with a sweet and jaunty run-through. And while Low are represented with Debbie Harry in Try To Sleep, harmonious and hypnotic, it’s a hook-up with that band’s Alan Sparhawk on Cass McCombs’s County Line that really gets the bottom lip trembling. It’s a sublime, somnambulant thing that shines from its core.
The pace of Duets Special is slow and steady, so inevitably there are moments where it drags a little, but to hear one of the great rock voices of her era in her element, sharing the music she loves with musicians she respects and complements, is a quiet, low-key joy to behold.
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