“Elusive and beautiful”: The Blondie ballad Debbie Harry wrote about watching Chris Stein in the shower
For the promotion of Parallel Lines, Blondie pulled out all the stops to prove themselves as an innovative force in rock. Among these were the charged essences of ‘Heart of Glass’ and ‘One Way or Another’, but what perhaps people didn’t expect was the sudden tenderness of the third single. After all, Blondie had accrued a reputation based on fast-paced anthems, less so love ballads about Debbie Harry’s romantic side.
At this point in history, it usually made more sense for songs so forthcoming in tenderness to be delivered in a specific way, either reserved for women in genres where it felt like a typical direction to head in or men, intertwined with ambiguities and poetic musings to deliver a deliberate sense of aloofness. There were exceptions, of course, but Harry wasn’t initially celebrated for exploring this particular approach when it came to her lyrics or the band’s sound.
When Harry first met Chris Stein, they likely hadn’t anticipated the longevity of their relationship, initially growing romantic before embarking on a more professional musical collaboration. “I was very taken with her,” Stein once said, recalling the moment he met Harry for the first time when she was performing on stage one night, allegedly just as drawn to him as he was to her.
He quickly became endeared to her unconventional approach to showmanship, and they bonded over their shared love of music. They eventually formed Blondie in 1974 and created some of the most revolutionary and new wave-defining music in all of history. As with many romantic liaisons in music, however, it’s always difficult to keep this separate from the art itself, especially when these experiences only serve to enhance the music beyond what it could have been before.
One such example was ‘Picture This’, the third single from Parallel Lines that Harry wrote about Stein. Softly calculated and addressing Harry’s enamourment with her musical collaborator, the song provided a stark contrast to the songs they had released before. Instead, it focused on matters of the heart through various musings about “a sight worth seeing” or, in this case, “watching you shower.”
According to producer Mike Chapman, the song’s “elusive and beautiful” lyrics took something as simple and mundane as watching Stein shower and made it poetically beautiful, showcasing a different side to Harry that delighted her team. As he explained: “When Debbie showed me the lyrics, I thought, “Woah.” This was something she’d obviously lived through. She was singing about an event in her life. I guess she was watching Chris [Stein] shower!”
Another thing that perhaps made this song considerably unexpected at the time was how Harry adopted a sense of quiet confidence about the whole thing. Some might have said that such a composition was best left to her male counterparts, those who often romanticised vapid actions by women as a means of exploring poetic license. Harry, on the other hand, did it with such finesse, proving that she didn’t really care much about what others deemed appropriate for women in rock.
