In the autumn of 1994, Patti Smith lost three people.
On November 4, her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith died suddenly of a heart attack. He was forty-five years old. The partner with whom she had lived, made music, and raised children in Detroit for fourteen years was gone without warning.
Within months, Richard Sohl — known as DNA, keyboardist from the original Patti Smith Group, long-time friend — also died. And in 1995, her brother Todd died.
Three deaths. Three people closest to her, gone within less than three years.
But Patti kept writing. Kept singing. Loss did not silence her — it drove her deeper into the only practice she knew: making art from the truth of being alive.
🖤 Three Years of Loss — Fred, DNA, Todd
Patti spoke very little, publicly, about Fred's death.
Not because the grief was shallow. Because it was too deep — the kind that, if you tried to put it into words, something structural might give way. That is a different kind of silence from emptiness.
What was Fred Smith to Patti? Not simply a husband. He had played guitar for MC5, the Detroit band whose political radicalism and sonic intensity anticipated punk by nearly a decade. When his fire met Patti's poetic fire, two flames became one. The fourteen years in Detroit — years in which Patti largely withdrew from public musical life — were years in which they wrote together, raised children together, lived inside each other's creative worlds. They wrote "People Have the Power" together in the kitchen. He was the foundation of the life she had built.
Losing Fred meant losing the ground under everything.
Richard Sohl — DNA — had been there from the beginning. From the first poetry readings in 1971, from Horses, from every stage of the group's early history. His piano was not accompaniment to Patti's poetry; it was another voice in the same conversation.
Todd's death, the loss of a sibling, brought a different kind of pain — the severing of the original community, the family that formed you before you could choose.
When these three losses arrived in such close succession, Patti's return to music was not escape or distraction. It was survival. For someone who has always believed that writing and living are the same activity, not writing in the face of loss would mean being consumed by it.
"I live through writing," Patti has said. "Without it, I would die." Listening to her say this, it does not feel like metaphor. It feels like a plain description of physiology.
🌊 "Gone Again" — Rebirth Born From Grief
In 1996, Patti Smith returned.
The album was called Gone Again — "again" doing the most work. Fred was gone again. DNA was gone again. Todd was gone again. And now Patti was back.
Listening to this album, the word "grief record" doesn't quite reach it. There is grief, yes — but it is transparent grief, not dense grief. The air on the other side of loss, cleaner and starker and more honest than any air before it.
The title track was written for Fred. But its lyric reaches past the specific to the universal: "Did you come here to take me away / Did you come here to help me through." The voice on this recording holds both vulnerability and indestructibility simultaneously — as though the same thing that makes it capable of breaking is also what makes it impossible to break entirely.
"About a Boy" — a tribute to Kurt Cobain, who also died in 1994 — addresses the same theme from a different angle. Fred and Kurt both gone in the same year; different deaths, different circumstances, the same fact of absence. Patti wrote for both of them. The title is an echo of Nirvana's "About a Girl," but reversed — a woman addressing the boy who made the music that shook the world, and then left it.
Gone Again was critically praised. But more than the critical reception, what mattered was what making this album did for Patti herself. In returning to music, she reclaimed the poet inside her — the person who had always processed experience through language and rhythm. The fourteen years in Detroit had not been wasted, and the three years of loss were not wasted either. Everything became material. Everything became part of the poem.
Peace and Noise followed in 1997, Gung Ho in 2000 — Patti releasing music consistently for the first time in nearly two decades, and doing it on her own terms.
🌍 Politics and Poetry — What "People Have the Power" Actually Means
No account of Patti Smith's career omits "People Have the Power."
Written with Fred and recorded for the 1988 album Dream of Life, the song was composed, according to the story Patti tells, while she was washing dishes in their Detroit kitchen. The domestic origin of an anthem: the world-changing statement made in the most ordinary possible place. This fact says something essential about who Patti and Fred were.
"People have the power to redream the world." The lyric has the simplicity of a political slogan but is not reducible to one. The critical word is "redream." Not "change" the world — "redream" it. For a poet, the imagination and the material are not entirely separate. To dream something differently is already to begin altering it. The priority of vision over action is the poet's politics.
Patti has always been political, but her politics emerges from feeling rather than ideology. She has never aligned herself formally with a party or a platform. She has spoken against the Vietnam War, against the invasion of Iraq, against the forces she sees as threatening human dignity — and she has done it as a poet, not as an activist. The distinction matters to her.
"People Have the Power" is still sung at demonstrations and gatherings today. Its endurance, nearly four decades after it was written, comes from the fact that it does not belong to a specific moment or movement. It belongs to whoever needs it in whatever moment they're in.
After September 11, 2001, Patti's first public response took the form of a poem, not a statement. Not anger, not grief only — a reaffirmation that people still have the power. That is the Patti Smith approach to the hardest moments: return to the root, return to language, return to the basic human fact of being alive and able to speak.
🇯🇵 A Bond With Japan — Fuji Rock and a Collaboration With Murakami Haruki
Patti Smith's relationship with Japan is long and deep.
Her first Japanese tour took place in January 1997 — long-awaited by Japanese fans who had followed her since Horses. In 2001 and 2002, she performed at the Fuji Rock Festival in consecutive years. The outdoor stage at Naeba, surrounded by mountains and forest and unpredictable summer rain — this environment resonated with the nature-reverence that runs through Patti's poetry and music. Fuji Rock is a festival where the land itself is part of the experience, and Patti's performance in that landscape felt right in a way that was hard to articulate but impossible to miss.
In July 2003, a solo concert at Akasaka Blitz deepened the bond. In 2013, she returned again. In 2015, she performed the complete Horses album to celebrate its fortieth anniversary.
But the 2016 Japan visit stands apart.
Patti came with her daughter Jesse Paris Smith (now a pianist in her own right) and performed alongside Philip Glass, Joe Hisaishi, and Murakami Haruki.
The pairing of Patti Smith and Murakami Haruki feels, to me, almost self-evidently correct. Murakami's novels reference Patti's music repeatedly — in Norwegian Wood, in 1Q84. His characters move through a world in which "Gloria" and Horses are part of the atmospheric reality. The loneliness, the loss, the continuing-anyway that defines Murakami's fictional universe shares the same emotional territory as Patti's work. Two artists from different countries and different forms who had been in silent dialogue across their work for decades, finally in the same room.
The collaboration with Joe Hisaishi — known internationally for his Studio Ghibli soundtracks — might seem like a more surprising meeting. Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, alongside the composer of the gentle, expansive music that accompanied My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke. But Patti has always refused the category that would confine her. Meeting Hisaishi was not a contradiction of who she is — it was an expression of the same impulse that drove her to combine poetry and rock in the first place: the refusal of the wall between forms.
"Fuji-san," the song on the 2012 album Banga, was written in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. It is Patti's prayer for Japan, in the form of music.
📸 The Documentary — Eleven Years of Intimate Record
In 2008, photographer Steven Sebring released the documentary film Patti Smith: Dream of Life. It was screened in Japan in 2009.
The film took eleven years to make. Sebring began shooting in 1996 and continued through 2007 — concerts, poetry readings, private moments, travel, the daily texture of a life. The eleven years of material was then assembled into a single film.
Eleven years is not a film project. It is a way of living alongside someone. Sebring was not an observer of Patti's life during this period; he was part of it. This is why the film has a quality that distinguishes it from any other music documentary: the self-consciousness that every documentary subject normally maintains in front of a camera gradually dissolved, and what remains on screen is simply Patti Smith, present in the moment.
One of the film's most affecting sequences is a scene at Fred's grave. Patti speaks to him quietly. "I'm still here. Still writing. Still doing what you wanted." No tears in the voice. But the weight of what she is saying fills the frame.
The film was well-received critically and brought Patti's work to a new generation of viewers. "I watched the documentary and then went back and listened to Horses for the first time" — responses like this arrived from around the world. That is what this film accomplished: it created new listeners for old music. This is how artists endure.
🏆 National Book Award — Patti Smith as Literary Figure
In 2010, Patti Smith received the National Book Award for Just Kids.
The National Book Award is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States. A musician winning it for pure literary writing is unusual, perhaps unprecedented at that level.
And yet — thinking about it carefully — perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. Patti was always simultaneously a poet and a musician. The lyrics of Horses read as poetry. The nine-minute spoken narrative of "Birdland" works as poetry read aloud. She never drew the line between music and literature that would make this achievement seem anomalous.
Just Kids is an extraordinary piece of writing. Patti's prose has the rhythmic quality of her poetry without its density; it is intimate without being confessional; it is personal without being self-indulgent. The story of her early years in New York with Mapplethorpe becomes, through the telling, something larger than two young people's shared poverty and mutual encouragement. It becomes an account of how artists come to understand themselves.
The passage that moves me most each time I read it is the description of Patti's gradual realization that she was not a supporting character in Mapplethorpe's story but the protagonist of her own. She came to New York wanting to be near greatness. She found that the nearest great thing was inside her.
Just Kids has been translated into more than thirty languages. Readers who discovered Patti through the book then discovered the music. Readers who had loved the music for decades found the book deepening their understanding of everything they'd heard. Both directions of discovery feel equally right.
🎵 "Banga" and the Later Work — Albums of Love and Prayer
The 2012 album Banga was recorded when Patti was sixty-five years old.
It feels like an album of accumulated wisdom — of prayers and meditations, rather than declarations. If the young Patti opened Horses with a declaration of war against the God who had died for others' sins, the Patti of Banga is in dialogue with the same forces — not arguing, but speaking with them. Not refusing, but questioning.
The album includes a song inspired by the death of a young man connected to someone Patti cared about. It includes "Fuji-san," the prayer for Japan written in the wake of the 2011 disaster. It takes its title from the name of the dog belonging to Pontius Pilate in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita — this literary depth sitting naturally at the center of an album title, because for Patti, music and literature are always one.
Earlier late-career albums — Trampin' (2004) and the covers record Twelve (2007) — are equally characteristic. Twelve is revealing: the songs Patti chose to cover tell you exactly what she hears in music and where she hears it. Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit — but also Jefferson Airplane, Stevie Wonder, and The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever." A canon assembled by feeling, not by genre.
The pattern across these years is consistent: Patti grows more herself with age, not less. The music becomes freer. The voice becomes deeper. If there is a single thing that her later career demonstrates, it is that artistic maturity and artistic vitality are not in tension. They are the same thing.
🎸 The Godmother's Legacy — The Inheritance She Left Behind
The influence Patti Smith has had on subsequent generations of musicians is genuinely difficult to measure — partly because it works at so many levels simultaneously.
The most direct influence is on women in rock music. Madonna has said that Patti Smith was her first real inspiration. Courtney Love, PJ Harvey, St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill — a generation of women who made noise and claimed space in rock music have pointed to Patti as the one who showed them it was possible. Not because she handed them a genre or a style, but because she modeled the fundamental posture: the refusal to seek permission.
Michael Stipe of R.E.M. — a long-time friend — has spoken about Patti's influence on his approach to lyrics and performance. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam has cited her. Joe Strummer named her. John Lydon has acknowledged what Horses represented for the Sex Pistols.
But the deepest level of influence is harder to name. It is the influence on the cultural assumption about what a musician can be. Before Patti, there was a fairly clear sense of what "rock musician" meant as a category: it did not generally include a person who brought their own poems to the performance, who referenced Rimbaud in interviews without irony, who saw rock and roll as continuous with the tradition of visionary poetry.
After Patti — and in large part because of Patti — this seems less unusual. The space she opened by existing in it has been inhabited by many others.
The specific thing she demonstrated with "Gloria" — that you can walk through a pre-existing song and, by placing your own words at its entrance, make it entirely yours while also transforming it — is a practice that runs through an enormous amount of subsequent rock music.
🏅 The Nobel Ceremony — The Fate of Standing In for Dylan
December 10, 2016. The Concert Hall, Stockholm, Sweden.
Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan himself was not present. Patti Smith stood in his place and sang.
Dylan and Patti: the connection runs deep. It was a Bob Dylan album that first opened Patti to the possibility that words could be music and music could be poetry. Dylan stands, alongside Rimbaud, as one of the two formative figures in her artistic life. He proved that the boundary between song and poem could be dissolved. Without that proof, Patti might not have been confident enough to cross it herself.
To stand on the Nobel stage in Dylan's absence and sing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" — the song Dylan wrote in 1963 at the height of nuclear anxiety, one of his most sustained and literary pieces — was not an arbitrary assignment. It was, in some way that is hard to articulate but easy to feel, the right thing.
And then she forgot the lyrics.
Standing before the Nobel laureates, the royalty, the cameras of the world, Patti stopped. She said into the microphone: "I'm sorry. Can I start again?" She started again. She finished.
The moment has been discussed ever since. Some called it a failure. Many — most — found it deeply moving. I am with the latter.
The girl who opened Horses with "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" — who refused, even in that first act, to perform what was expected of her rather than what was true — was, in Stockholm, true in exactly the same way. She forgot the lyrics because she was human. She said so because she is constitutionally unable to pretend otherwise. She continued because continuing is what she does.
"I thought I might die," she said afterward. "But the audience waited. That's what held me. And I went on."
Going on. That is the single theme that runs through everything Patti Smith has ever made or done.
In 2026, Patti received the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts — Spain's royal arts prize, one of the most significant international cultural honors. Once again, her contribution was recognized formally. Once again, the recognition seems both apt and slightly insufficient to contain what she has actually done.
⭐ What Patti Smith Left Behind — The Permanence of Poetry and Soul
Patti Smith is, as of 2024, seventy-eight years old and still working.
She tours, writes poetry, publishes books, takes photographs. The activity is not confined to music, has never been confined to music. But across every form, the animating principle is the same: honesty. The refusal to be anything other than exactly what she is.
Fifty years after Horses. Half a century since "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" was spoken into a microphone in New York and sent out into the world.
That line is still valid. May be more valid now than when it was written. In a time when words are weaponized, poetry is marginalized, and division is manufactured — a voice that keeps insisting on the power of the individual to redream the world remains not merely relevant but necessary.
What Patti Smith has proven across five decades is the power of the poet who speaks honestly. Not the power of rebellion — rebellion is still performing for an audience. The power of honesty, which doesn't need an audience at all.
The refusal of genre confinement, the refusal of authority, the refusal of the permission-seeking posture — these were never acts of defiance. They were acts of fidelity. Fidelity to the thing she heard in Rimbaud, in Dylan, in the factory where she stood at the assembly line writing poems on scraps of paper.
The girl who arrived in New York in 1967 with a book of Rimbaud's poetry and a handful of pencils did not know yet that she was an artist. She learned it slowly, in the years with Mapplethorpe, in the years at CBGB, in the years in Detroit with Fred, in the years of loss, in the years of return.
She is still learning. That is the most Patti Smith thing about her.
"We were young. We didn't know. But we had dreams." She wrote this in Just Kids. The dream is still going.
"People have the power to redream the world." As long as that line is being sung somewhere — in a concert hall, in a kitchen, in someone's headphones on a train — Patti Smith's soul endures. 🎤
https://toshiyu03.blog/let-me-have-my-say-%f0%9f%8e%b5-the-music-memories-corner/
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