Akron-born rock legend Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders comes ‘back to Ohio’

CUYAHOGA FALLS , Ohio (WJW) — If life imitates art — and vice versa — then this rock legend’s Northeast Ohio homecoming was poetic.

Ahead of The Pretenders ‘ Tuesday night concert at Akron’s Goodyear Theater, singer/songwriter Chrissie Hynde swung by a Cuyahoga Falls house — one with special significance for her.

“We are now in Ohio!” Hynde wrote early Tuesday on social media . “Here’s me posing outside my childhood home in Cuyahoga Falls.”

Hynde, 72, grew up near Akron. She attended Kent State University before moving to London and forming The Pretenders, now known for classics like “I’ll Stand by You,” “Back on the Chain Gang” and “My City Was Gone.”

“Even after nearly half a century of living across the pond, her accent remains remarkably Ohioan, though she calls soccer ‘football’ and friends ‘mates,'” Kory Grow wrote for Rolling Stone in 2020 .

The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, recognized as the “missing link” between “the iconography and idealism” of 60s guitar rock and the “nihilism” of 70s punk rock, wrote Jaan Ubelszki for the Rock Hall .

“What is probably most significant is that it took a single woman, born and raised in one of the grittier bowels of the American Midwest, who answered an urgent call to travel to the UK for her own rock and roll baptism,” Ubelszki wrote.

One of the band’s hits is about Hynde returning to Ohio and seeing how commercialization had changed the landscape.

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls

Said, ay, oh, way to go, Ohio

The Pretenders, ‘My City Was Gone’

If you missed The Pretenders here, they’re coming to Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park on Thursday evening , as special guests of the Foo Fighters.

Their latest album, “Relentless,” dropped in 2023.

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