“Stop Your Sobbing” by The Pretenders

The Pretenders' very first single wasn't one of their own: "Stop Your Sobbing" was a Ray Davies song from the Kinks' debut album, Kinks, and the band later tucked it onto their own debut, Pretenders, in 1980. Nick Lowe produced it, with Bill Price engineering and mixing and Steve Nye adding extra recording, and the result is lean, bright and a little wistful, a pop song with its heart stuck somewhere back in the jukebox era.

The song itself is a complaint with nowhere to go. Its narrator is fed up with a girlfriend who can't stop crying and begs her to quit, but nothing he says works, and by the end he's still stuck, still exasperated, with nothing settled. The Pretenders take all that frustration and make it sound almost sweet, which is quite a trick.

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