20. Glitter in Their Eyes (2000)
Not all the politicking on Gung Ho landed right – Stange Messengers is unbearably clumsy – but Glitter in Their Eyes’ plea for a younger generation not to get hooked on materialism is impressively punchy and potent, abetted by the presence on guitar of her old sparring partner, Television’s Tom Verlaine.
19. Don’t Say Nothing (1997)
Like its predecessor, Gone Again, Peace and Noise was an album awash with loss and mourning. Don’t Say Nothing sounds like a note to self, a concerted effort to shake free from the torpor of grief and start over: “Gonna straighten up, gonna get well, I’m gonna do something, gonna face the fact.”
18. Space Monkey (1978)
A streetwise rock’n’roll strut, married to a lyric in which an alien invasion, or possibly the revenge of simians used in space exploration, gets mixed up with the French actor Pierre Clémenti. If Easter was Smith’s most commercial album thus far, you never forgot you were in the presence of a one-off figure.
17. Paths That Cross (1988)
Written for Robert Mapplethorpe after the death of his partner, Sam Wagstaff, the beautiful Paths That Cross offers a warm, optimistic view of eternity as “a glow we all will know”. Given that Mapplethorpe was also sick – he died within a year of the song’s release – you suspect Smith was equally engaged in preparing herself for his loss.
16. Frederick (1979)
Wave received a mixed response – its poppy smoothness taken as evidence that Smith’s heart was no longer in it – but has grown in stature over the years. Frederick, the opener, is just fantastic, an unabashed proclamation of love that sounds almost giddy with excitement.
15. Privilege (Set Me Free) (1978)
In the same way that Horses’ opening track transformed Van Morrison’s Gloria, so Privilege took the title song from the 1967 film about a pop star turned fake messiah and interpolated it with Psalm 23. What emerged was a song that seemed to speak loudly about Smith’s increasingly complex and troubled attitude to fame.
14. Redondo Beach (1975)
On release, Rolling Stone called Horses “as original an original as they come”. Certainly, I struggle to think of another song like Redondo Beach, the grim story of a girl’s suicide on a beach patronised by gay men and women, set to an incongruously jaunty reggae-infused backing.
13. Dream of Life (1988)
For an album with a decidedly varied reputation among Patti Smith fans – not everyone loves its straightforward, distinctly 80s-hued rock approach – Dream of Life has a remarkable number of great songs on it. The title track is a case in point: think of it as an older, wiser relation of Because the Night.
12. Mother Rose (2004)
A reflection on the death of Smith’s mother, written from the perspective of a daughter who is now a mother herself, this is the highlight of Trampin’. “It’s not a grieving song … hopefully a really pretty song,” she clarified after its release. It is, indeed, utterly lovely: tender and atmospheric.
11. This Is the Girl (2012)
Right from the start, Smith was big on writing about her dead heroes. The passing of Amy Winehouse added her to the pantheon of lost inspirations. This Is the Girl has a hint of Winehouse’s retro soul sound– or perhaps Smith’s beloved doo-wop – about it; the lyric is affecting, tender and maternal.
10. Gone Again (1996)
This was the last song Smith wrote with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, before his death, an event that transformed it from a paean to indigenous American culture to a eulogy for its co-author and a meditation on the transience of life: “The ashes’s rain / Death’s own bed / Man’s own kin / Into the wind.”
9. Free Money (1975)
As close as Horses got to punk rock as the world would come to understand it – check out Penetration’s 1978 cover to hear how easily its three-chord riff adapted to the subsequent sonic template – with remarkably prosaic lyrics about winning the lottery. Its gradual build in pace is thrilling.
8. Piss Factory (1974)
The deconstructed cover of Hey Joe on the A-side of Smith’s debut single was great, but the B-side is something else: autobiographical provincial ennui set to guitar and piano, its climactic burst of manifesting – “I’m gonna go on that train and go to New York City / I’m gonna be somebody!” – exhilarating and stirring.
7. Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer(de) (1975)
Nine and a half incredible minutes that meld together the saga of a locker-room rape, a garage-band cover of the old R&B standard – best known in Wilson Pickett’s 1966 version – references to cocaine, Smith’s favourite poet (“go Rimbaud!”) and “the sea of possibilities”. It sounds like nothing else, yet still rocks in time-honoured style.
6. People Have the Power (1988)
Smith’s great latter-day anthem has had a long afterlife: it has turned up as U2’s live intro music and the theme for the 2004 Vote for Change campaign in the US. It’s obvious why: its rabble-rousing is optimistic and effective, its message – “the people have the power to redeem the work of fools” – perennially consoling.
5. Beneath the Southern Cross (1996)
An extraordinary waltz-time dispatch from the depths of grief, Smith’s voice somewhere between incantation and a wail, that gradually builds from abjection to a kind of catharsis – “crossover boy!” – backed by ghostly guitar noise and an ethereal backing vocal (the last thing Jeff Buckley recorded).
4. Pissing in a River (1976)
After the gamechanging explosion of Horses, its disjointed follow-up, Radio Ethiopia, divided opinion. Amid its confused stylistic lurches, the one thing everything seemed to agree on was that Pissing in a River’s brooding, glowering, increasingly desperate depiction of love gone sour was a slow-burning masterpiece.
3. Dancing Barefoot (1979)
Smith has claimed that, growing up, she thought the coolest thing was “to be an artist’s mistress”. The finest song on Wave – subsequently covered by U2, Pearl Jam, Shakespears Sister and the Mission – was inspired by Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani’s muse and mistress, who died by suicide two days after the artist’s death.
2. Because the Night (1978)
An unfinished Bruce Springsteen song, completed by Smith, Because the Night was parachuted on to Easter by the producer Jimmy Iovine in the quest for a big hit. It duly became one, partly because it was the most straightforward rock anthem Smith recorded, but mostly because it’s an incredible, irresistible song.
1 Gloria: In Excelsis Deo (1975)
Smith’s debut album began with one of the most celebrated opening lyrics in pop history. But “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” was far from the most radical thing about Smith’s reimagining of Them’s garage-rock standard. It turns it inside out, transforming it from a song about male sexual desire to one about sexual desire from which men are excluded, sung in a voice unlike anything anyone had heard before: supremely cool and tough, but distinctly female. It was as if Smith was creating a new space – an “atmosphere where anything’s allowed”, as another lyric put it – before your ears.
The 50th anniversary edition of Horses is released on 10 October on Legacy Recordings. The Horses tour of the US and Europe begins on 6 October at the 3Arena, Dublin
