‘Mother’: the greatest opening lyric Debbie Harry ever wrote
Blondie is one of the most influential bands in all of history.
No, really. Look around at any corner of the music industry, and chances are you’ll come across some kind of Blondie reference. It may be subtle, but it’s there, hiding in plain sight. A constant thread of innovation forever pushing the industry forward.
Most of what came out of the new wave scene was a bit like that – capturing lightning in a bottle by obliterating the sparks entirely. And the best part about Blondie wasn’t that they were trying to be revolutionary; they weren’t. Debbie Harry didn’t even consider them a part of the punk scene like many of their peers. They went against the grain because it was what they were genuinely interested in.
Which is also why, beyond the revolutionary nature of their arrangements and cross-genre references, Blondie also provided a masterclass in storytelling. Most of their hits came from a very real place, like the empowerment of ‘One Way or Another’ or the honest lamentation of love hidden deep in ‘Heart of Glass’. But real storytellers are the ones who mythologise their own story along the way without diluting their own authenticity.
Which is also why ‘Mother’ has some of their best lyrics ever. Harry even said so herself once. “I think it’s one of my best lyrics ever,” Harry told The Guardian. Written about a club called Mother, Harry took those late-night amblings and layered them with “underlying feelings about searching for motherhood”. The song itself ruminates on yearning to find something she might have never even had, a surface-level deliberation on lost motherhood with other sprinklings at every turn.
The lyrics themselves hold the same kind of directionless quest you might find clouding your mind in the late hours at a club. But when placed with motherhood, it all becomes a stronger depiction of faux-maternal malaise: “Now that I can’t remember / I need you more than ever / Why can’t we be together always?”
But the strength of the story is compounded right in the first line, when the song’s dark, gritty imagery begins and sets the tone for the rest of the piece: “In a packed-in-leather life / I was foolish, you were right / All night rookies pass the time / Looking for somewhere to go / Shiny boots are up their thighs.”
It gives off the same kind of individualistic creature-of-the-night charm as something like Nightclubbing, where the central character is someone clad in all the dark, shiny, leathery attire that gives the song its edge. But there’s also the vulnerability there in the way Harry becomes honest about what she doesn’t have, even if she doesn’t exactly spell it out.
In that first line, she also applies nuance to her longing, where she almost willingly surges into a world where all things waste away, including time. And yet, the only thing that defines it is how everybody is looking for a distraction. In other words, it looks at how the scene only satisfies the emptiness for so long. But it’s not necessarily about being sad or discouraged, but noting the complicated nature of that strange place where fun and despair coincide.
