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Within months of Blondie landing two chart-topping, genre-hopping hits (”Rapture” and “The Tide Is High”), Deborah Harry released her first solo album, a compelling collaboration with Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers that fused together funk, new wave, jazz, and pop. In the years since its initial release, the album’s striking cover art by H.R. Giger is remembered more than the actual music but a re-evaluation of the Chic collective’s innovative work with Harry is long overdue. (Used copies of the CDs short-run re-issue on Razor & Tie fetch for upwards of $100 online.)A few years after contributing the Giorgio Moroder-produced “Rush Rush” to Scarface (1983), Harry teamed with producer Seth Justman for a well-considered set of pop tunes bolstered by studio stalwarts like Jocelyn Brown, the Uptown Horns, and Jimmy Rip. Despite its massive reception in the UK, promotion for Rockbird in the US didn’t rock so much. By 1986, Madonna had become the key priority for Warner Music Group, which distributed both her label (Sire) and Harry’s (Geffen). Ironically, the forthcoming UK-based musical of Desperately Seeking Susan is comprised solely of Blondie songs and a new Harry tune.Harry’s third solo effort reunited her with Blondie producer Mike Chapman, whose disciplined approach in the studio gave the artist some of her most enduring solo sides. Longtime co-conspirator Chris Stein wrote most of the songs with Harry and the duo’s synergy birthed typically artful and tuneful tracks. The album’s breadth of musical offerings is impressive and, minus some late-’80s production quirks, Def, Dumb and Blonde has held up extremely well.Crate-diggers would do well to seek out Harry’s criminally overlooked ‘93 outing, Debravation (recently re-released on the Wounded Bird label). An eclectic cadre of producers—eight—gave Harry a few sonic sandboxes in which to frolic about. (Future Blondie guitarist Leigh Foxx contributed a couple of songs.) Harry raps, punks-out, and recites a few lines of Edgar Allan Poe; in other words, a perfectly normal Deborah Harry album.It was inevitable that Harry expanded her elastic voice to jazz, having previously flirted with swinging combos on Blondie’s Autoamerican (1980). The Jazz Passengers, fronted by Roy Nathanson, was the perfect vessel to showcase Harry’s gift for carrying a song over upright bass, vibes, trumpet, sax, and drums. Though not a solo album per se, the accessibly offbeat Individually Twisted further secured Harry’s footing in a range of musical worlds.Two Blondie reunion albums and one Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction later, Deborah Harry’s latest solo album reflects how she’s influenced two generations of artists. The production team of Super Buddha is the perfect complement to Harry’s stylistic orientations; greasy glitter rock, gossamer ballads, and danceable pop frame the inspired musings of a poet’s heart.