‘Heart of Glass’: The Blondie song that took five years to get right
Of all the Blondie songs, perhaps one sticks out more than the others. ‘Heart of Glass’ finally arrived on the band’s third studio album Parallel Lines, in 1978. It was selected for release as the record’s third single in January of the following year, but the process of writing the song from its origins to its final format was arduous, to say the least.
During an interview with the CBC, Debbie Harry once opened up regarding the long process behind the song. “Oh, it’s one of my favourites,” she said. “We had it for about five years.” Blondie had an early version of ‘Heart of Glass’ as far back as 1974, and it was, in fact, one of the first tracks the band wrote together.
The song was originally titled ‘Once I Had a Love’ and had a basic disco beat behind it, as inspired by The Hues Corporation’s hit song ‘Rock the Boat’. By the time the song was ready for another demo in 1978, it had turned into a more pop-oriented direction, with producer Mike Chapman at the helm.
Harry continued: “Finally, when we were recording with Mike Chapman for the first time, we were running ideas in rehearsal, and he said, ‘Well, do you have anything else that you used to play? Have you got any hidden tracks?’ And so we said, ‘Well, we have this one,’ and we started to play. He got very excited, and he wanted to record it.”
Yet the problems of how the song should sound remained, and Harry admitted to the band, trying it with influences from a wide range of genres. “One of the problems with this song was getting the right feel for it, putting it in its true perspective,” she said. “We tried it as a reggae song, we tried it as an R&B song, we tried it as a rock song, we tried it with a lot of different feels, and it didn’t move right.”
It was a piece of electronic equipment that eventually gave ‘Heart of Glass’ its now iconic sound. Harry said, “So the guys went to the music store, and they came back with this little rhythm machine. It was sort of one of the newer pieces of technology, which, nowadays, looks like a wind-up toy.”
“So they were fooling around with it and started getting all these different sounds, different feels going,” she added, “and then they got serious about it and put it together.” The track was clearly influenced by European disco music like ABBA but also by American artists like Donna Summer. It’s one of Blondie’s classic songs and serves as their homage to the dancefloor.
