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.
