“I felt confident”: Patti Smith on why ‘Trampin” was her first authentic album
Patti Smith’s career as a musician is a fascinating one. Part of the reason why she has always been deemed a ‘punk poet’ is because that’s exactly what she is, and that feels like a way to honour the inseparable nature of both sides of her career. There have always been two voices at play: the rock star and the writer, but the two are utterly tied together to the point where they are one and the same. However, having always seen herself more as an Arthur Rimbaud than a Keith Richards, Smith’s confidence in her musical voice didn’t always match the powerful competency she’s always possessed.
This was reflected first in the amount of time it took her to truly get started. After running away from her small town life to New York, on a mission to honour the artistic calling she hoped to have, Smith didn’t start music for many, many years. Instead, she dipped her toe in slowly and cautiously, starting first with her Rock and Rimbaud performances, where Lenny Kaye accompanied her on guitar while she would just read poems. It was radical and exciting, yes, but it was also comfortable; a way for Smith to start exploring her desire to make music while also remaining more in the confines of the form she felt familiar with.
Horses reflects this attitude as her debut is the perfect balance between those poetic pieces and bigger rock songs. As she advanced with her albums, the balance was played with more and more as the musicality got bigger, and her artistic scale grew with her confidence. Across each record, those two parts of her artistry danced together, finding a division and a collaboration that felt natural and right. But in Smith’s eyes, they didn’t find true harmony until she was well into her career.
In her eyes, it took her nine albums to truly get it right and find her voice. “For me, Trampin’ was my first real record as myself,” she said. It’s not a fact, of course. 2004’s Trampin’ was actually the sixth album registered as simply Patti Smith, rather than the Patti Smith Group, but still, it featured the same cast of collaborators backing her up. It was nowhere near her first rodeo, but in spirit and substance, she felt like it was. To her, it felt like her first time truly on her own two feet as an empowered artist.
“I felt confident to speak out against the Bush administration’s strike on Iraq, but to do it in a way that couldn’t be dissected politically,” she said, addressing how the album touches on more topical issues. That’s what makes it so important to her, and it feels like a fresh and powerful restart. Smith has always been deeply locked into current goings on. On her social media, she still uses her platform to highlight global injustices and share calls for action and solidarity. On Trampin’, it felt like the first time she’d used her music to do that, too.
Now decades into her career, Smith finally felt like she’d found her voice when she’d cast off the insecurity and fear that coloured her first steps, enabling her to get heavier in her subject matters. “[I] was very proud of Trampin’, because for me, it was like Horses in that I wasn’t filled with self-doubt—Am I good enough? Should I be here? Should I quit? Am I trying to make money? I didn’t do this to be famous—all the things Kurt Cobain spoke about, I know those conflicts and that schism,” she said.
Powerfully concluding, “But Trampin’, I had things to say and ideas that I wanted to impart, and I wasn’t worried about all of that.”
