{"id":6396,"date":"2015-03-08T18:01:56","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T01:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6396"},"modified":"2015-03-17T18:05:25","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T01:05:25","slug":"heart-of-glass-how-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/03\/08\/heart-of-glass-how-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Heart of Glass How-to"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

How Blondie Created \u2018Heart of Glass\u2019<\/h1>\n

Blondie\u2019s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein talk about \u2018Heart of Glass\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

By\u00a0MARC MYERS<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Until 1978, Blondie was a punk band with a cult following and not much visibility in the U.S. beyond New York\u2019s Lower East Side. Eager for a hit album, Chrysalis, the band\u2019s label, paired Blondie with\u00a0Michael Chapman,\u00a0an inventive producer who had success recording other downtown artists, including\u00a0Suzi Quatro\u00a0and Sweet.<\/p>\n

The result was \u201cParallel Lines,\u201d Blondie\u2019s third album, and the single\u00a0\u201cHeart of Glass.\u201d<\/a>After the song\u2019s release in early 1979, it became Blondie\u2019s first Billboard pop-chart hit, climbing to No. 1 in April 1979, helping to pave the way for synth-pop and electronic dance music (EDM).<\/p>\n

Mr. Chapman and the song\u2019s co-writers\u2014Debbie Harry\u00a0(who opens at New York\u2019s Cafe Carlyle March 24) and guitarist\u00a0Chris Stein(author of the recent \u201cNegative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk\u201d)\u2014talked about the hit\u2019s evolution,\u00a0Donna Summer\u2019s influence and the struggle to adapt the high-impact Euro-techno sound. Edited from interviews:<\/p>\n

Chris Stein:<\/span>\u00a0When Debbie and I were living in our top-floor apartment at 48 W. 17th St., I often messed around on a borrowed multitrack tape recorder. It let me record a rhythm guitar track and then layer melody and harmony lines on top. I wrote and developed my songs this way. In the summer of 1974, I wrote a song and referenced the catchy feel of\u00a0\u201cRock the Boat\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by the Hues Corporation, which was a big hit then. Debbie and I began calling it \u201cThe Disco Song.\u201d<\/p>\n

Debbie Harry:<\/span>\u00a0I used to keep a notebook to jot down lyrics and ideas that came to me. On this one, Chris was constantly experimenting with the song, and the lyrics just floated into my head. The words I came up with expressed a very high school kind of thing, of falling in and out of love and getting your feelings hurt. But instead of dwelling on the pain, the words sort of shrugged off the breakup, like, \u201cOh, well, that\u2019s the way it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chris and I both came from an art background, and we were familiar with existentialism, surrealism, abstractionism and so on. The feeling I wanted to get across was, \u201cLive and let live,\u201d like this is what happened and now it\u2019s not happening, you know? I threw in the \u201cOoo-ooo, ohhh-oh\u201d fill when we started performing the song at CBGB. It was a 1960s \u201cgirl group\u201d thing. Chris and I both loved R&B.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at WSJ.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Wall Street Journal How Blondie Created \u2018Heart of Glass\u2019 Blondie\u2019s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein talk about \u2018Heart of Glass\u2019 By\u00a0MARC MYERS Until 1978, Blondie was a punk band with a cult following and not much visibility in the U.S. beyond New York\u2019s Lower East Side. Eager for a hit album, Chrysalis, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}