The Pretender

This song is about settling for less than what was envisioned and the resulting diminished expectations of the promises that were made about "free love", peace and the fulfillment that these were suppose to provide to a generation of people growing and living through the 1960s. Jackson Browne, an artist who was certainly influenced by the hippie culture, wrote the song in the mid-1970s after the crux of the hippie movement of the 1960s abated.

The hippies believed that love and the resulting peace stemming from love would conquer all that ails in the world. One of society's ailments included the abject materialism during the 1960s which was greatly spurred by "Mad Men" who "take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender." America was becoming wealthier and many consumers were nonchalantly buying material goods while ignoring the body bags of mostly economically poor soldiers coming back from Vietnam. The hippie movement wanted to highlight that the pursuit of material comforts is distracting people from what is important in life and preventing them from seeing the injustices done in the world.

As a backlash to consumerism, many hippies rejected material comforts and some even opted to live in a "bare essentials" world where food was self-sufficiently grown in communes and pursuit for materialism was shunned. This lifestyle was thought to provide inner peace, give valuable introspection, and freedom from being a slave to what one owned. The idea is similar to what Thoreau believed in his day. That is, the pursuit of a materialistic life was thought as a hindrance to mankind.

In "The Pretender", Browne is singing about the unrealized dreams of a fulfilling peace brought forth by "true love" and ironically has "surrendered" to a life he was protesting against just a decade ago. As a result the character in the song feels like a "pretender." That is, he doesn't wholly believe that the suburban and material-driven life he is leading is actually fulfilling, but he is resigned to this life now.

The pretender understands and knows in his heart that there is more to life than "the struggle for the legal tender," but nevertheless is mundanely resigned to "believe in those things that money can buy." His hopes of a life of love leading to true and lasting happiness and fulfillment is becoming dimmer and further away in the material wasteland of suburbia. Thus, "the ships bearing their dreams sail out of sight" and all the pretender's "hopes and dreams" from a decade ago "begin and end" in his suburban existence. "Veterans" of the hippie movement, such as himself, who "dreamed of the fight" against the pursuit of material comforts, are now "fast asleep at the traffic light" in their purchased cars somewhere in suburbia.

He is aware that the ingredient that makes life fulfilling is missing from his and so he hopes to find himself a girl who too feels the emptiness he does. He hopes that as a couple they can fill the void each other feels by filling "the missing colors in each other's paint-by-number dreams." The "paint-by-number dreams" refers to their abandoned dream of happiness through true love and peace. He plans to make love to this woman and thereby try to fill the emotional void through physical contact with someone he loves.

However, the pretender is doubtful that this in and of itself will be sufficient to quench his restlessness and disappointment with his suburban material-driven existence. He "thought true love could have been a contender." Meaning, true love could have been sufficient to truly make him happy, but he made the compromised decision to put faith in the pursuit of material comforts which now dominate his life and to some extent imprison him.

The pretender only "pretends" to believe that this routine suburban life in pursuit of creature comforts is fulfilling, but he is not fooling anyone, least of all himself, since he knows that the unrealized dream was supposed to be much better. As Thoreau has said, "most men lead lives in quiet desperation," but the "desperation" stems from compromising your own belief, in the pretender's case "true love", and putting faith in "those things money can buy."