There’s a moment in most lives when you notice that you’ve been going through the motions for some time. You say the right things, you turn up on time, you smile at the appropriate moments, and all the while some quieter part of you is wondering who exactly is doing the smiling. “Pretending” is a song about that moment. It opens Journeyman, Eric Clapton’s 1989 album, and it was a big hit on rock radio, but I suspect people responded to it for reasons beyond the tune. Clapton didn’t write it. He just sounds as though he lived it, which, for the purposes of a good record, comes to much the same thing. Let’s have a look at why it works so well.
An Album of Fresh Starts
Journeyman was Clapton’s eleventh studio album, and it arrived in November 1989. The title is worth a moment’s thought. A journeyman is a craftsman who has finished his apprenticeship but hasn’t yet reached the rank of master, which is a modest thing for a man to call himself when his admirers had once treated him as something close to a deity. It suggests a musician who has accepted that he’s still learning. That attitude runs right through the record, and “Pretending” sets the tone on the very first track, before anyone has had time to settle into their chair.
The song itself was written by Jerry Lynn Williams, a Texas songwriter who supplied Clapton with a handful of tracks on the album, “Running on Faith” among them. Clapton had been working with Williams since the mid-eighties, when the record company sent over some of his demos, and he had grown genuinely fond of the man’s writing. Williams had a knack for a voice that suited Clapton: weary, wry, a little battered but not defeated. Russ Titelman produced the album, and it drew on a first-rate team of session players, including the bassist Nathan East and the drummer Jim Keltner, who between them kept everything beautifully steady.
What It’s About
The lyric is about pretence, naturally, but with a pleasingly specific sting. The narrator has been behaving as though everything’s fine. He’s been putting on a front, carrying on, keeping up appearances for the benefit of anyone who happens to be watching. Now he can’t keep it up, and the song is the sound of him admitting it, first to himself, and then to whoever’s listening. There’s an exhausted honesty to it. He isn’t blaming anyone, and he isn’t asking for sympathy. He’s simply tired of the performance, which is a feeling known to actors, politicians, and anyone who has ever hosted a dinner party.
That theme landed neatly on Clapton’s shoulders. By this time he’d come through some very bad years, and the album as a whole feels like a man looking back at the wreckage with a clear head. You don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the song. But if you do, the lines about hiding behind a mask take on a different colour. It’s the sound of someone who has stopped hiding, and who finds, rather to his surprise, that this feels like relief. There’s no triumph in the delivery. There’s just the quiet exhale of a man putting down a heavy bag.
The Guitar and the Groove
Musically, it’s a stately, mid-tempo rocker, with a rolling keyboard figure and a guitar that sounds as though it has been polished by hand. The production is glossy in the way of late-eighties records, with plenty of reverb and a drum sound as wide as a barn door, but Clapton’s playing cuts through the sheen. His solos here are lean and singing, shaped like sentences. He doesn’t rattle off notes for the sake of it. He picks a few and lets them hang in the air, and the effect is of someone choosing his words with care because he’s learned what careless words can cost.
I’ve always thought the real trick of the song is its pacing. It starts quietly and builds without ever quite exploding, so the drama is held in reserve. That suits the theme. A man who has been pretending doesn’t suddenly erupt. He sags, he sighs, he lets the mask slip by degrees. The arrangement does exactly the same. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between a song that illustrates an idea and a song that embodies it. You feel the weight of it settling on you, a few bars at a time, without being told to.
Why It Struck a Chord
The record was a significant hit on American rock radio, and it earned Clapton some of the best notices he’d had in years. It also sat nicely alongside “Bad Love”, the other big single from the album, giving Journeyman a one-two punch that kept it in the shops for months. Listeners who had drifted away during the synthetic eighties found their old hero sounding human again, and that’s a rare and precious thing for a famous musician to manage. It’s one thing to be admired. It’s quite another to be welcomed back, and I think this record did both.
I think it also struck a chord because everyone recognises the feeling. We don’t all have a guitar and a record contract, but we’ve all been somewhere we didn’t want to be, wearing an expression we didn’t feel. A song that names that sensation, and doesn’t try to wrap it in a bow, does its listeners a small kindness. It says, you’re not the only one. In pop music, that’s about as good as it gets. It’s also, I’d suggest, a lot harder to write than a love song, because nobody wants to admit they’ve been faking it.
There’s an irony worth savouring here, which is that a song about wearing a mask should come from a performer, somebody whose whole trade involves presenting a version of himself to a crowd. Every musician pretends a little. The question is how much of the act is truth. Clapton has always been at his best when the gap between the two is narrow, and on this record it’s very narrow indeed. He doesn’t dress the song up with heroics. He sings it at conversational volume, the way you’d tell a friend something you’d been meaning to say for months, and the lack of theatricality is exactly what persuades.
The Last Word
So what is “Pretending” really about? It’s about the exhausting business of keeping up appearances, and about the surprising lightness that follows when you stop. Williams wrote the words, but Clapton’s weary, unshowy delivery makes them sound earned. It’s a perfect opener for an album about starting again, and a perfect companion for anyone who has recently looked in the mirror and not quite recognised the person smiling back. I’ve no great wisdom to add, except to say that the song is kinder than it sounds. It doesn’t scold. It just tells you, gently, that the mask can come off, and that the person underneath is probably better company than the one you’ve been presenting to everybody else.