Horses by Patti Smith

This album is from 1975. 36 years ago Patti Smith, who had been in NYC scene for onto a decade appeared with this album like few things before it.

Smith who is now in the middle of a renaissance of her career with music and books and writing for The New Yorker in the late sixties and seventies was palling around Robert Mapplethorpe.

This album is one I have heard referenced for years but never listened. I do not recall ever hearing any of the tracks on the radio even the more out there channels I have taken to listening to.

Still critic after critic quotes it's importance. Listening to it is an experience. The album opens with a version of Gloria that is, like everything Smith does, uniquely hers. The album is not sing along music. It is to me landscape music. It is background music.

None so much as the twin epic tracks Land and Birdland. I can hear these songs in unwritten movies in my mind at times where one stays up late in a darkened room and drinks or smokes by their lonely self. Staring at the red or green lights of the stereo and considering the depth of their despair or the ineffectual place they have in the world.

That might seem a stretch but what is not a stretch is Smith in her talk sing way paints a portrait like the poet/artist she clearly is.

Land, with it's constant references to Horses is where we get the album title. I have listened several times and cannot pretend to know what it is all about. I do know there are many references to rock and roll history and assume one could teach a course on the cultural landmarks referenced.

My favorite track is Birdland. Similar in scope to Land but with a jazzier background this IS one of the best songs you can hear to entertain your demons with. I have many times listened to Neil Young in the Everyone Knows This is Nowhere phase to comfort myself or acknowledge myself with alcohol and self medicate myself into calmness when life was too much. It seems clear to me that had I been exposed to Birdland in those days Patti Smith would have been on that Playlist as well.

Kimberly and Eligie are two more songs that are strongly reccomended but to be honest I need to hear them more.

In anycase this album is all it is promised to be. Art. It is art from a disjointed time to listen to in any disjointed time in your life.

Fantastic.