“I wish we didn’t”: The one song Patti Smith never wanted to write
Every classic song is usually something that is felt rather than heard. Even though most people come to any song for a catchy tune, the true artists are the ones who live inside their poetry and try to come up with some cathartic release every time they manage to get everything pressed onto vinyl. Although Patti Smith was never going to go the route of making disposable music, she did admit that she never wanted to write one of her late-period highlights.
Then again, Smith was never going to withhold her emotions whenever she sang. Looking back on some of her first shows with her band, the lion’s share of her dance moves seem like an interpretive way of letting all of her pent-up feelings out into the world, even if not every one of them was on the same level as Michael Jackson or Madonna.
That method was pageantry, and whatever Smith was doing had to be natural. But despite having some of her best songs crop up during the early 1970s on Horses, a lot of them were channelled through pure pain. Outside of shocking the world about Jesus not dying for her sins, Smith was dissecting some of her personal issues, like telling the story of a man digesting the death of his father or having to carry her baby sister out of a burning barn.
At the same time, Smith was still a fan of rock music, and half of her songs were about being able to cover ground that her friends never got to. She had always talked about being guided by Jimi Hendrix when completing her first album, and with years removed from her early days, hearing her sing lines about how it’s much too bad that some of her friends couldn’t be there to celebrate with her only gets more tear-jerking with age.
Because none of us are getting any younger, and when Smith got to work on Banga, she had started seeing more rock and roll casualties stack up with the death of Amy Winehouse. Many icons had fallen since Smith had started, but Winehouse’s tragic passing felt like watching a Greek tragedy play out in real-time, especially with the press hounding her at every turn.
While Smith did write ‘This Is The Girl’ as a way of eulogising Winehouse, she would have traded in that song to have had her back in the world, saying, “She was the same age as my own children. It was a song I wish we didn’t have to write.” And judging by the way that she sells it, you would have sworn that Winehouse was actually one of Smith’s offspring, given the circumstances.
But the reason why ‘This Is The Girl’ works so well has less to do with the gory details. Smith was never known to write lavish expose-style songs in the vein of Bob Dylan, and hearing her send off Winehouse by talking about the dark smear masking her eyes and just wanting to be heard is the kind of vulnerability that we need to see out of more tribute songs rather than typical ‘I miss you’-style ballads.
Because Winehouse didn’t deserve to be given the massive rise to stardom that she had. She was still trying to figure out her fame like everyone else, and somewhere along the way, the public seemed to forget how vulnerable someone can be when they are given that kind of attention.
