"Middle of the Road" is a single that appears on The Pretenders' album Learning to Crawl. The song peaked at #19 on the US pop singles chart and #2 on the US mainstream rock chart in January 1984, where it stayed for four weeks. Allmusic critic Liana Jonas calls "Middle of the Road" a "classic example of pure, unadulterated rock music." She ascribes this to the fact that the lyrics focus on people's innate desire to "get up and go" and the "driven" music backs up the sentiment. Fellow Allmusic critic Mark Deming calls it a "furious rocker."