A few pieces of creative advice shared by Debbie Harry:
- You can’t please everyone all the time
- You can never make a big enough fool of yourself
- Use the perspective you’ve earned
As my plans to interview Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie for The Believer first took shape, billboards sprang up, as if on cue, around Manhattan. Sprawled several stories high was Harry’s image, framed in a moody fashion-house ad. A glance up from the sidewalk suddenly felt freighted with the vastness of Blondie’s legend: the art and fashion iconography; the timeless hit songs; and the band’s enduring influence on countless artists, among them No Doubt, Garbage, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Paramore.
Yet the image of Harry amid the New York City landscape also felt grounding and familiar. In tandem with their early punk peers at CBGB on the Bowery, Blondie achieved wide renown with music that documented and theatricalized countercultural urban life. Just under the surface of the band’s tight, shiny pop constructions are vignettes of connection, alienation, and thrills among downtown denizens, variously struggling and striving apart from an indifferent or hostile mainstream.
Harry and Stein founded Blondie in 1974, branching out from the rock-cabaret group the Stilettos, where they first met. The band played small New York clubs with various lineups for years, finally achieving breakthrough success with their chart-topping, critically acclaimed album Parallel Lines in 1978.
Blondie’s balance of accessible pop sounds and social subversion is often clinched by Harry’s singular powers as a front-person and stylist. Whether portraying a sex worker who falls for a cop (“X Offender”), an under-the-radar queer missed connection (“Love at the Pier”), or the dueling voices of stalker and victim (“One Way or Another”), she can sound funny and cynical, ethereal, browbeaten, or unhinged—all while maintaining a fine attunement to everyday speech and slang.
Harry’s crafting of persona was also a distinctive (and still underexamined) contribution to the feminist energies of punk and new wave. In her persistent multivocality—assuming a range of perspectives and identities through performance—Harry turned sharply away from expectations around the emotional transparency of women in rock that had carried over from the ’60s. And although she was conventionally pretty, she was not exactly approachable: A heightened quality to her dress and gender presentation often contrasted with an enigmatic stage presence.
The creative vision of Blondie was further shaped by Harry’s partnership with Stein, with whom she wrote several of the band’s most memorable songs, including “Dreaming,” “Heart of Glass,” and “Rapture.” Stein’s love of film and all manner of pop subcultures became an important influence on the band’s lyricism. His and Harry’s interest in emerging genre innovators also pushed the band to embrace the disco, reggae, and hip-hop sounds that would gain massive popularity in the decades to come. As a talented photographer, Stein helped define Blondie’s stylized look early on, while his images of Harry, the Ramones, Iggy Pop, and many others documented punk’s eccentric visual argot, its serious grit and glamour shot through with an anarchic scrappiness.
A new Blondie studio album—their twelfth—is now slated for release in 2026. I spoke to Harry and Stein over Zoom, trading the sweeping scale of the billboard for small squares on an LCD screen. The discussion that ensued was relaxed, gently cantankerous, and roving.
For more than fifty years, Harry and Stein’s friendship has sustained itself, built on a shared appreciation of art, music, and each other’s points of view. They seem less interested in reviewing their past achievements than in advocating for the things that helped them grow artistically: intellectual curiosity, persistence, and a strong sense of community. As artists who have always been alert to new technologies—from zines to drum machines—they offer a particularly sharp perspective on the potency and pitfalls of digital media.
— Emma Ingrisani
I. “ECCENTRIC AND ENERGIZED
AND CRAZY”
THE BELIEVER: When did you both start thinking of yourselves as songwriters?
CHRIS STEIN: Well, for me it was kind of out of necessity. We did so many cover songs over the years, and it wasn’t something I was averse to, but there was a moment when I knew we needed to get our own material going. When I met Debbie with the Stilettos, they had already been doing original songs.
DEBBIE HARRY: It was the name of the game. We did some club dates where we had to play top-ten hits, recognizable songs, for an audience who were pretty much drunk and there for a simple night out. They weren’t downtown, artsy-fartsy people that were looking for an experience. They just wanted to have a good time and hear music they knew.
We were working slightly in that area, to make some money. But most of our focus and energy were on being part of this underground culture. We both understood it very easily—it was really something that we loved and that we knew. And there was already a great history with the Velvet Underground and other groups.
CS: The New York music scene had been pumping for years and years. I mean, fucking Dylan came outta here, somewhat. The Lovin’ Spoonful when I was a kid—all that was going on here at the time.
DH: The folk scene in the West Village was very influential, a lot of energy there. Though I don’t think either of us was really a big part of it.
CS: I was embedded in it, but I didn’t do any performing.
BLVR: There’s a book you put out in the ’80s called Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie—it’s a great document of the band’s first few years. At one point Debbie talks about a “non-period of punk”: the moment right before punk in the early ’70s when the New York Dolls stepped in, and that seemed to be a big shot across the bow for this new movement.
CS: Well, I always say that the first two Rolling Stones albums are completely punk…
DH: That was the crossover from glitter and glam rock.
CS: [The Dolls’ impact] was kind of informed by their ragged playing. I don’t say that to demean them—they just weren’t as tight as Bowie’s band. Everybody went to see Bowie’s band [the Spiders from Mars] when he was touring around the same period. But the Dolls were much looser.
DH: And their enthusiasm and higher energy, their stance lyrically, and the way they dressed—it wasn’t about being a finely tuned machine or a big showbiz thing. It was about being exactly what they were: eccentric and energized and crazy, you know?
CS: Equally in there with the musicianship.
BLVR: Earlier today I was looking at a piece by Lorraine O’Grady. She’s known mostly as a performance artist, but she also wrote some rock profiles and reviews. She was very interested in the Dolls, and she talks about this feeling during the same period that rock and roll was stagnating. People felt like it wasn’t continuing to evolve, and the Dolls were seen as disrupting that by being really ambitious, very theatrical, and also imperfect.
CS: Yeah, bands like the Eagles presented this image of a closed group that you had to be really proficient to get into, and none of us were. We were all enamored of the Stooges and the MC5, and all the stuff that was very raw and struggling.
BLVR: As you were starting to write songs and becoming part of the punk scene in the city, so many of the bands had different sounds and styles. They were complementary, but they were distinct. Did people go off by themselves to compose or come up with new things, or was there collaboration across the scene?
CS: Oh, there was a lot of incestuousness. We used to play Television songs. I don’t know if we ever performed a Ramones song at CBGB’s—we might have.
DH: I don’t know if there was any collaboration in the writing end of it.
CS: No.
DH: We all were fans of one another, and so, you know: paying attention. I don’t know if anybody really wanted to be a dead copy. In a way, the thing that made the scene was that it wasn’t a format. There was no format. It wasn’t like there was a lot of schooling or trained musicianship. It was about enterprise and feeling, identity.
I think now we find that chops, so to speak, are seen as very, very important: being able to play anything. But the things we could do, and the ways the groups shaped themselves, were at the limits of the players’ abilities. And I think that’s kind of wonderful. It really creates a sound and an attitude and a zone that you can be in, and it propels itself along.
CS: It’s about dealing with your shortcomings, more than this constant striving for some sort of perfection that you have in your head, whatever that might be.
I know what Debbie means about the chops as far as bands go—you gotta be able to shred very precisely at this point. And it also relates to pop music. I really like a lot of modern pop music—there’s so much that I am really enamored of—but it does all bounce off itself. She used the word format: There are certain formats that everything slips into very easily.
Read the rest of the interview over at The Believer.
