“That record feels like me”: The album Patti Smith wants to be remembered for
Patti Smith will always be remembered – that’s a fact. She secured that legacy long ago, a time when she first wowed the New York art crowd with her Rock and Rimbaud poetry readings, then wowed the punk crowd with her music, and then, from there, wowed the world. Across her albums and books, Smith has secured a spot in iconography, but alongside her name, she’d like this record to sit alongside her.
There’s a reason why Patti Smith is deemed the ‘Godmother of Punk’. Before her, life was different; after her, it was never the same. When she first emerged as a musician, slowly adding more instrumentation to her poetry readings until suddenly she was a rock star, it was a lesson that literature and pure energy could go hand in hand. Her debut album, Horses, proved that as raging rock songs sat alongside long, meandering improvisations as Smith unfolded the stories that existed in her imagination.
All of her albums go on like that as it has always been her literary streak that as led the way. Obviously, the punk side is important and the impact of her musical collaborators, especially her work with her husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, cannot be understated as they gave her a musical identity and power that will never be forgotten. But to Smith, as with many of her fans, the words have always led the way.
“I like the longer improvised pieces such as ‘Radio Baghdad’, ‘Memento Mori’ or ‘Radio Ethiopia’”, she told The Guardian. In all these cases, the tracks span beyond the ten-minute mark as the artist delivers not just a musical opus with her band swelling around her but a literary one, carrying her listener through a full story within the space of the song. That has always been the thing she loved doing as she gets to let her creative mind simply wander across a track, falling into a flow state as her band build a sonic nest for her words to sit in.
That’s a skill she wants to be remembered for but when it comes to picking one album to define her, it’s a somewhat unexpected one. “As a whole album I like the last one, Banga,” she said.
After the death of both her husband and her brother in quick succession back in the late 1990s, Smith’s career was helped to return with the support and love of a team of collaborators. Names like Bob Dylan, Michael Stipe, Tom Verlaine, John Cale and her long-term band members like Lenny Kaye encouraged her to work through it. After the release of Gone Again, the first record following these tragedies, her resolve to return to her practice was clear. She toured and wrote and made more records, and then, in 2012, Banga felt like a new pinnacle, as if, five records on from Gone Again, she’d finally and truly found her feet.
She hears herself on it, in a more spiritual, emotional sense, especially on another lengthy, meandering track. “‘Constantine’s Dream’, the long improvised piece at the end, touched a lot of things that concern me – art, the future of mankind, climate change, the horrors done to our indigenous people, and love,” she said.
Returning to these lengthy improvisations that first launched her, a lot about Banga felt like coming home, even down to how the making of the cover artwork seemed to mirror the making of the Horses cover as it was shot spontenouslt with a friend. “I love the cover, which was shot on the fly by my friend Stephen Sebring,” she explained.
But overwhelmingly, Banga is simply a record that feels reflective of who Smith is, stating, “That record feels like me.” So, of course, that’s the one she’d want to be remembered for.
