“My City Was Gone” by The Pretenders

"My City Was Gone" first slipped out in October 1982 as the B-side of "Back on the Chain Gang", the Pretenders' first release after the death of founding member James Honeyman-Scott, before it landed on Learning to Crawl and became an American radio favorite. Chrissie Hynde, an American expatriate in London, wrote it as a lament for going home to Ohio and finding the green countryside of her childhood paved over, name-checking Akron's South Howard Street, whose historic heart had been flattened for a plaza of towers and parking decks.

The opening bass line was just something Tony Butler used to play to warm up, engineer Steve Churchyard recalled. With Billy Bremner and Hynde on guitars, Martin Chambers laying down a stark, bare-bones beat and Chris Thomas producing, it's a protest song that moves like a slow, sullen prowl.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.