Lady Gaga interviews Debbie Harry about her upcoming album, being an icon, and that famous hair color, in Harper’s Bazaar’s September issue, on newsstands August 16. Full interview here.
Lady Gaga: It’s hard to make records that you are happy with artistically and then be aware that you have a record label and it must be commercially sold. Tell me more about “China Shoes.” I actually started to cry when I first heard it.
Debbie Harry: You’re an artist, and you’re feeling things and giving them your own interpretation; we embrace it, and the emotion touches us, and then we apply it to our lives. I mean, even jokingly, you know how women feel about their shoes [laughs]. It becomes very important.
LG: It made me very, very emotional. It reminds me so much of my life, especially when you mention Brooklyn, because I live in Brooklyn. It reminds me of how sometimes I feel that moments in my life are interrupted because I’m so dedicated to my work. I often feel like my shoes are the only part of me that know what I’m doing all the time because they’re always with me. There’s this one pair of boots that I always wear, and sometimes when I’m so alone in my hotel room, I look at them and I think how they really are the only things in my life that know exactly what I’ve been through all day. So is that what the song was about, or was there a different meaning?
DH: I try to put a core of real sensitivity and make the words childish to just say simply, This person is going away, and I’m missing them very much. I’m not going to recover unless they come back soon, and I’m leaving this note in the back of a book because I know you’re going to read it when you are traveling.
LG: That’s so funny because I had a lover who was a writer, and I used to leave him notes in his book, so it meant a lot to me. I know it sounds so crazy that the lyric would fit perfectly to my life, but that song was just really beautiful.
DH: I’m loving it too, and we actually do it now in the show. I’ve seen one of your shows, actually. I went to the Garden. It was fantastic.
LG: Oh, you were at the Garden? Actually, it’s probably best that I didn’t know you were there because I would have been too nervous.
LG: Now, this is a more over-arching question, but are you aware of the tremendous effect you had on women when you dyed the underside of your blonde hair black? Because when I experiment with a different blonde, like I did that very yellow blonde and a teal blonde and a lavender blonde, I put a black root in because of you.
DH: I did it for practical purposes because I was always doing my own hair and I didn’t think I could do the back. But I ended up really liking having the back be this sort of dark side of the moon. Because when I was in school, that was one of my nicknames: Moon. It seemed perfect, that here I was with the bright side of the moon and the dark side of the moon.
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