The album Patti Smith intended to be her last: “A difficult record”
Patti Smith never intended to be a recording artist – that was not her mission. Her mission wasn’t even to be a musician, a novelist, or a poet; she only ever wanted to be an artist, as the biggest and grandest definition of the word. So the albums she made were a surprise, or at one point, she thought they were merely fleeting vehicles for her voice that she was ready to move on from.
“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” Smith wrote in Just Kids. It was a feeling that stayed with her as a constant through her childhood, her teens, her difficult early adult years as a worker stuck on a depressing factory floor, and then it was the feeling that powered her to move forward. This inkling that she was called to be something more, or the desperate hope that she was, pushed her to move to New York, to imbed herself into the artistic scene and start building her name.
That didn’t come without moments of vivid doubt. “I wondered if I had really been called as an artist,” she said of the moments in her younger life when things felt uncertain. “I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation, but I dreaded not being called.”
But the thing Smith learnt was that it’s not really about being called; it’s about working, and she has never been put off by hard work. When she moved to New York, she didn’t just sit on her hands waiting for greatness to hit. She grafted hard to find her voice, and then, when she met Lenny Kaye, she found a new way to get it across with the help of a rock band.
Initially, Smith’s music was nothing but backing to her poetic works. It was all part of her ‘Rock and Rimbaud’ shows, where a band merely accompanied her readings. But slowly, without even Smith herself really realising, things changed, and suddenly, she was a leading figure in punk and one of the brightest stars in the New York music scene, growing towards the legacy she has today as one of the most revered names in rock.
That wasn’t her goal, though. Albums were never her goal; they were simply the way her art flowed out for a while. Horses, Radio Ethiopia, and Easter came easily and felt right. After that, though, Smith thought that when Wave proved a struggle, she was done.
“[Wave] was a difficult record to make because we were out of the city, in the middle of winter in Bearsville, pretty much snowed in, and I thought it might be the last album I did,” Smith told Uncut. Unlike the process of her previous albums, her fourth felt like a battle against her muses rather than an easy collaboration with them. To her, that felt like a sign that maybe the album was no longer the medium they wanted to work in.
“I felt it was time for me to evolve as a human being. I hadn’t ever really planned to make records. I came to that organically, and I felt that I had really expressed everything that I knew how to express,” she explained. So she followed that. After Wave was released in 1979, she didn’t release another album until 1988, when Dream Of Life emerged as a spontaneous release, born out of the collaboration between herself and her husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.
Making it felt like making her first albums—easy, thrilling, natural. So, while Wave wasn’t her final album, it was the album that reminded her of how she likes to work.
