The Blondie song Josh Homme called “perfect music”
Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme has channelled an eclectic catalogue of influences throughout his career. While he originated from a heavy rock background, Homme has evolved as an artist with each project and experimented in various genres across the musical spectrum.
In 2017, Homme moved Queens of the Stone Age in a dramatically new direction when he integrated Mark Ronson into the fold and recruited the Englishman to produce their album Villains. While it still had elements of their stoner rock DNA, which Homme first expressed with his first band Kyuss, the LP also had an enticing danceability.
Queens of the Stone Age is not a band who are traditionally associated with the dancefloor, but Homme has always been a defender of groups that blend disco with rock. One of the trailblazers in this area of music is new wave icons Blondie, who rose to fame in the late 1970s and had a string of commercially viable hits while never compromising their rock ‘n’ roll principles.
They were an unstoppable force in the charts, but unlike many of their peers in the hit parade, Blondie were authentic and born out of New York’s club scene. Their third album, Parallel Lines, sent the group stratospheric and was once named by Homme as one of his all-time favourite records.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2003, Homme said of the album: “I love Blondie. I like what this album did in its time frame. And Debbie Harry is just smart, tough, sexy all at once. It’s like, ‘What do I do?!’ I like girls that make other men scared. Lots of guys’ versions of respecting those girls is to panic, like ‘I need to go to the bathroom!’ – but I love it.”
The Queens of the Stone Age frontman then named his favourite song from the record, adding: “‘Heart of Glass’, it’s the perfect music for a sunny day, and it’s not always raining.”
While ‘Heart of Glass’ was a track Blondie released in 1978, the track previously spent years in the oven before it was finally cooked. During an interview with the CBC, singer Debbie Harry once spoke about the long process behind the song. “Oh, it’s one of my favourites,” she said. “We had it for about five years.”
Harry added: “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.”
She then revealed how they headed to the music store to buy a “rhythm machine”, which was the song’s secret ingredient. “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.”
Listen below to ‘Heart of Glass’.
