There’s a moment, early in Horses, when Patti Smith tears through the polite fabric of 1975 and rewrites what a rock album could sound like.
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” she declares, not as rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but as a kind of invocation — the curtain call of a new church. The record feels like a séance for rock’s restless spirit, calling up Rimbaud and Jagger in the same breath, a communion of poetry and noise.
“People said beware, but I don’t care; their words are just rules and regulations to me.”
Punk, in its infancy, was splitting into two schools: the angry and the artsy. The Ramones, in leather and sneer, hammered through three chords like they were chiseling their way out of the ’70s. Patti Smith, dancing barefoot in the same city, was turning those chords into spells — or as she and her co-conspirator Lenny Kaye called it, “three chords merged with the power of the word.” Where the punks wanted to burn the house down, Patti wanted to paint the ashes. She learned how to straddle the divide effortlessly — equal parts fury and faith, gutter and gallery. You could hear it in her delivery: half rock ‘n’ roll holler, half Beat café sermon.
The songs themselves chart the collision. “Gloria” is pure ignition — Van Morrison’s garage classic reimagined as an exorcism, Patti spitting, praying, and seducing all at once. It’s the sound of rock being born again in its own image. “Birdland” stretches the form until it nearly breaks, a nine-minute improvisation that feels like Kerouac fronting the Doors, a fever dream where loss turns to levitation. And then there’s “Free Money,” her ecstatic hymn to escape — the fantasy of abundance sung by someone who knows exactly how little she has, and how vast the imagination can be when that’s all that’s left.
Then comes “Land: Horses,” the album’s trembling axis — part myth, part resurrection. In its swirl of Johnny and the sea and the charging horses, Patti allegorically reenacts Jimi Hendrix’s death, turning it into a vision of rebirth. Where Hendrix’s guitar once caught fire, Patti finds transcendence in the ashes. It’s both a requiem and a rallying cry: rock and roll dying and being born again through her voice.
John Cale, bringing the haunted precision he once lent to the Velvet Underground, shapes the sound with a lean, spectral touch — letting her stretch and break the lines without losing the pulse, giving the chaos form. And the incomparable Tom Verlaine, fresh from Television’s downtown frontlines, threads his guitar through the haze like a live wire on “Break it Up” — delicate one moment, defiant the next — grounding her poetry in pure electricity.
Horses was never meant to be an overthrow alone. Patti wanted it to stand as both tribute and transmission — a love letter to her heroes and a benediction for the new guard. You can hear her tipping her hat to Dylan and Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground and Jagger, while handing the torch to whoever would next dare to carry it.
Joe Strummer studied Horses like scripture; after seeing Patti perform, he decided to leave the 101ers and go make music that mattered with The Clash. Michael Stipe has said it rewired his brain, giving him a vocabulary for the spiritual within the mundane. You can trace her fingerprints through The Slits’ feral feminism, Courtney Barnett’s sardonic sprawl, even the journal-like urgency of Mitski or Big Thief. Every singer who’s ever blurred the line between poetry and punk owes a line or two to Patti.
Then there’s that album cover that’s as iconic as the music itself. Shot by Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti’s lifelong companion in art and spirit, the photograph captures her standing against a blank wall, white shirt crisp, black jacket slung casually over her shoulder, eyes staring straight through you. It’s androgynous, confident, and holy in its restraint — a visual manifesto for the album’s blend of grace and grit.
Mapplethorpe saw her as she wished to be seen: not a rock star, not a muse, but an artist at the threshold of becoming. Their bond, so central to both their mythologies and beautifully documented in Patti’s 2010 memoir “Just Kids” was one of creative devotion — two outsiders giving each other permission to become themselves. You can almost hear that same mutual electricity humming beneath every note of Horses.
Horses plays best in the half-light — preferably early in the morning, in a Lenox Park breakfast room, before you’ve remembered who you’re supposed to be that day. It’s not a gentle record but a living one, pulsing hardest when the coffee’s cooling and the world hasn’t yet demanded anything of you, when you can still believe you might become someone braver. And if you’re listening then, hang with the right kind of friend — someone who’s seen a few things, who won’t flinch at silence or ask to skip “Birdland,” who knows when to nod and when to let the room breathe. The kind who understands that vulnerability and swagger aren’t opposites, that art, like life, needs both.
Listening now, Horses doesn’t sound like a relic — it sounds like a door still swinging open. The anger remains, but so does the grace. The same album that sneers at convention also prays for transcendence. Patti’s genius was knowing you didn’t have to choose between the two.
And here’s the closing riff: Every generation gets its own version of Horses — that record that cracks something open inside you and dares you to live differently. For some it’s Nevermind, for others Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Lemonade. But Horses was the first to make that offer in such vivid, trembling color. Patti Smith didn’t just sing about transformation — she became it, in real time, on tape. Even later, when she sang the hit co-penned with Springsteen “Because the Night Belongs to Lovers,” it was still that same flame from Horses, carried forward — proof that the night also belongs to the dreamers, the doubters, and anyone still brave enough to reach for something holy in the dark.
Fifty years later, the invitation still stands: walk into the temple, howl if you must, and see what catches fire.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Free Money”. What starts as a vulnerable ballad-like recollection of Smith’s poor upbringing spirals into an up-tempo testimony tangled in angst. To Smith, getting rich is not about fighting the system, but outrunning it. This is something she took notes on from her mother as she recalls closing the blinds to hide from debt collectors in her memoir, “Just Kids”. To grow up with next to nothing gives you the ability to dream of anything, and to know Patti Smith is to know she is a professional dreamer.
Using the same energy with which she fantasized the idea of money, Smith observed the idea of fame long before it happened to her firsthand by being a fly on the wall, watching and drawing inspiration from Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Bob Dylan. Patti pocketed a little bit of inspo from all of these legends as she formulated her own sound in which whimsical wordsmith meets pop punk poet.
“Free Money” is one of the few songs in Horses with a recognizable chorus and song structure. Others just bleed into each other like acts from an improv indie play in a small, dark, smoky New York City theatre — you’re not really sure how you ended up here, but now you can’t look away.
Wendell’s favorite song by Patti is “Dancing Barefoot,” but since that song is not on this album, he instead selects “Break It Up” as it sounds like she is trying to wrestle a dream into daylight and refusing to let it win. Co-written with Verlaine, it opens like a prayer and ends like an exorcism — all marble wings and broken statues, half erotic, half haunted.
The myth goes that she dreamt of Jim Morrison trapped in stone, and the song feels exactly like that: grief hitting the high note of desire. Verlaine’s guitar shimmers like something trying to breathe underwater while Patti’s voice claws at transcendence, cracking and rising in the same instant. It’s her most romantic track on Horses, which means it’s also her most terrifying — tenderness disguised as riot, the sound of someone finding holiness in the fracture.
At the top of our holiday gift guides will always be “Just Kids”, but this year we are adding Smith’s new memoir, “Bread of Angels” to the list. “Just Kids” is like the standout, favorite child. It’s like a vibrant indie film in book form. “Just Kids” captures Smith’s intense friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in 1960s and 70s New York City, as she documents her climb out of adolescence and into fame and creativity.
“Bread of Angels” acts as the prequel to this story, showcasing the most intimate of Smith’s earliest memories. “Bread of Angels” takes us through her teenage years, where the first glimmers of art and romance begin to bloom. Rimbaud and Dylan make their cameos as creative role models as she begins to write poetry, then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave, and Easter.
And in true Patti Smith calculated artistry, as is everything in her life, “Bread of Angels” was released this week on the anniversary of both Mapplethorpe’s birthday and her former husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith’s death day.
Patti Smith’s work can be found here, and her music is on all streaming platforms and wherever records are sold. You are likely to find her songs played on SiriusXM stations Underground Garage and First Wave. Patti is touring with her band to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Horses this fall, but the closest they’ll come to Atlanta is Washington, D.C. on Nov. 28 and complete list of tour dates are here.
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