I just started listening to the new release of Blondie's Against The Odds 1974 -1982, a 3-disc set with 52 rarely and never-heard-before Blondie tracks! It includes a 1974 version of "Heart of Glass" (called "The Disco Song"), a private stock version of "X Offender," take 1 of "Die Young Stay Pretty," and various home tapes and demos.
It's available on Apple Music and all streaming platforms. It's also available as a box set with 124 tracks and lots of goodies, including a 2-volumes of liner notes by Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Clem Burke, Jimmy Destri, Nigel Harrison, and Gary Valentine (aka Gary Lachman, author the excellent Dark Star Rising), and a 120-page illustrated discography.
"I am hopeful that this project will provide a glimpse into the 'process' and some of the journey that the songs took from idea to final form," said Chris Stein. "Some of this stuff is like early sketches; the old tape machines are like primitive notebooks. The trickiest thing for me was always about getting the melodies out of my head into reality and the changes that would happen along the way."
The songs were selected from an archive Stein keeps in a barn near Woodstock, NY, which includes "100 reel-to-reel tapes, half a dozen cassettes, a few storage tubs crammed with records, bits of promotional flotsam, flyers, a stray Warhol print, and mirrored dressing room signage from four sold-out January 1980 nights at London's Hammersmith Odeon. All of it lay in wait through twenty humid summers, twenty frigid winters."
