In Reckless, My Life as a Pretender, Double Day (2015), Chrissie Hyndes describes how she always loved music and wanted to be in a band. She actually had a chance to record as a solo artist and turned it down. She especially loved hard masculine rock and reveled in Punk Rock London. The Pretenders don’t begin until Chapter 27. The first 26 chapters contain a lot of drugs, sex and missed opportunities. None of the few bands she was in before the Pretenders lasts more than a chapter. It is not clear when she started writing songs or how many she wrote. She never followed classic song structure and attributes her quirky time signatures to her inability to keep time. Every time she wrote a song she was afraid she would never write another. She feels her songs finally came alive when she got together with James Honeyman -Scott the future lead guitarist of the Pretenders. He is in love with melody and hates the punk rock movement she has been a part of. The Pretenders were immediately extremely successful. Unfortunately, Honeyman-Scott died a few years later.