The Pretender

This song is about a man who gives up his dreams and lives a life of routine monotony in order to accumulate money. He is the pretender.

In a 1997 interview with Mojo magazine, Browne said of this song: "I'm a big fan of ambiguity and its bountiful rewards, and 'The Pretender' is two things at once. It's that person in all of us that has a higher ideal, and the part that has settled for compromise - like Truffaut says, there's the movie you set out to make, and there's the one you settle for. But in a more serious way, 'The Pretender' is about '60s idealism, the idea of life being about love and brotherhood, justice, social change and enlightenment, those concepts we were flooded with as our generation hit its stride; and how, later, we settled for something quite different. So when I say 'Say a prayer for The Pretender,' I'm talking about those people who are trying to convince themselves that there really was nothing to that idealism."

Browne wrote this song after tending to a person with schizophrenia. "We spent about two or three days trying to get this guy help," he told Rolling Stone in 2014. "He disappeared once, and we found him down the street, sitting in the living room of a Latino family, smoking a cigarette and acing like he belonged there, like nothing was wrong. He was faking it, pretending to belong. I wouldn't say 'The Pretender' came out of that story, but the idea is there: that we're pretending to go along with something that isn't quite where we belong, a default version of reality, with a job and a house."