This is one of The Pretenders’ most layered songs, and also one of their most radical, here performed in a stripped-back but striking way. Chrissie Hynde sings beautifully with just the accompaniment of a pedal steel – and the audience, whose spontaneity adds something magical to the performance.
The song may sound like a love song – it is certainly intimate and devotional – but it reaches for something more profound. It is about femininity itself: woman as archetype. Here, “She” appears as mother, lover, daughter, witch, survivor, and inheritor of memory. The lyrics draw on pagan motifs of womanhood – “the maid and the mother / and the crone that’s grown old” – while Hynde sings, “I’ve been your lover / from the womb to the tomb.” This is not meant literally but mythically. It speaks of a lifelong devotion to the feminine force: the love of a worshipper or initiate.
There is strength here, too. The repeated opening lines – “Let me inside you / into your room / I’ve heard it’s lined / with the things you don’t show” – evoke a hidden interior world, the parts of womanhood culture does not permit to be visible. That idea feels just as resonant now as when the song was written by Meg Keene, a friend of Hynde’s from school.
The chorus, though, is anthemic, celebrating endurance and continuity – “She will always carry on / something is lost / but something is found / they will keep on speaking her name”. It is a vision of survival through storytelling, of identity passed from one generation to the next. With this song, The Pretenders seemed to open a door that others would later walk through.
