Patti Smith

speaker

369 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 1 Dec

Patti Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ Turns 50 · 7 Nov 2025 podcast

It was the style that you performed and the personality that you put into it, the kind of defiance that you had in some songs, the energy.

Would you talk about what you felt you were doing early on that was different from what you'd seen other people do?

I think my perception of myself was really as a performer and a communicator.

My first album, Horses, my mission and the collective band mission was really on one level to merge poetry and rock and roll, but more humanistically to reach out to other disenfranchised people.

You know, we, in 1975...

The young homosexual kids were being disowned by their families.

Kids like me who were a little weird or a little different were often persecuted in their small towns.

And it wasn't just because of sexual persuasion.

It was for any reason, for being an artist, for being different, for having political views, for just wanting to be free.

And I really recorded the record to connect with these people.

And also in terms of our place in rock and roll, just to create some bridge between our great artists that we had just lost, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison among them,

and to create space for what I felt would be the new guard, which I didn't really include myself.

I was really anticipating people or bands like The Clash and The Ramones.

I was anticipating in my mind that a new breed would come, television.

A new breed would come, and they would be less materialistic, more bonded with the people, and not so glamorous.

I wasn't thinking so much of music.

I wasn't thinking so much of perfection or stardom.

I had this mission and I thought I would do this record and then go back to my writing and my drawing and

And, you know, returned to my, you know, my somewhat abnormal normal life.

But horses took me on a whole different path.

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