Patti Smith’s favourite early Patti Smith songs
While we typically associate punk with British bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, the genre started out across the pond, more specifically, in New York. Among the underground bars and venues were musicians who were, in turn, inspired by the abrasive sounds of 1960s garage rock. Proto-punk acts like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges were just some of the musical touchstones these burgeoning punk musicians leaned upon, spawning a genre that would change music for the better.
Patti Smith moved to New York in the late ‘60s in search of art, community, and culture. Here, she met artists and musicians to whom she could finally relate, as she had lived in the Chelsea Hotel for a while. She began performing her poetry, eventually adding musical accompaniments. After releasing her first single, ‘Hey Joe/Piss Factory’, Smith started playing more and more, working on a debut album.
Horses emerged in 1975 and featured experimental instrumentation and raw vocal deliveries, oftentimes using simple chord progressions. Rough around the edges and wholly unique, Smith’s album cemented her as a seminal voice in New York’s alternative scene, helping to kick punk into gear.
She inspired everyone from The Slits to PJ Harvey, and as she released more albums, like Radio Ethiopia and Wave, Smith proved herself as a genius songwriter, a pure poet who was able to utilise her distinctive voice to tell emotive stories. The ‘70s was perhaps the most important decade of Smith’s life. During this time, her life was rocked by encounters with great artists, love affairs, excellent literature and powerful performances.
When Smith thinks back to making Horses, she remembers (via Big O) “all of our youthful hopes and dreams,” given that she started writing many of the tracks when she was really young, just 20 years old. “It was really a period of strong idealism and physical energy and camaraderie because it was when I banded with these people and had my first experience of having a rock ‘n’ roll band.” But which of Smith’s early songs are her favourites?
When asked to pick a favourite album, she couldn’t decide, but she managed to list a few of her most beloved songs, starting with ‘Birdland’. The song appears on Horses, which was inspired by A Book of Dreams, about Wilheim Reich. In the track, Smith sings, “His father died and left him a little farm in New England,” opening up a narrative about Reich’s son, Peter, imagining him as an alien-like figure controlling a spaceship. The song was also inspired by Chubby Checker’s song of the same name.
“I really like ‘Radio Ethiopia’,” Smith shared in the interview. The track from the album of the same name divided fans when it was first released because of its abrasiveness, but Smith has always loved it. Lyrically, she was inspired by one of her most beloved poets, Arthur Rimbaud, to whom she dedicated the album. “That’s always my favourite piece, that long one,” she explained.
Additionally, Smith shared, “I hadn’t listened to the records for a long time but lately I started listening to them again, and I enjoyed listening to ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘25th Floor’.” The former appears on Wave and remains one of her more popular and accessible tracks. Released in 1979, the song has been covered many times by artists ranging from Pearl Jam to Simple Minds. Finally, ‘25th Floor’ from Easter – one of Smith’s most lyrically lucid tracks. She references love, rebellion, death and excretion, singing lines like “Coming for the kill/ Kill kill oh kill me baby/ Like a kamikaze.”
Smith has a positive attitude to all of the music she has made. She concluded, “When I listen to the music, I just think of all the hard work and the joy that went into them. I sometimes feel a little sad because some of the people that I wrote the music with have died. Things like that, I do feel a little sad. But the music, I still have nothing to be ashamed of. I have no regrets and I feel good about all of them.”
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