The Friday song (on a Sunday): ‘Kimberly’ by Patti Smith

A great song by a strong woman in the spirit of Women’s Day weekend.

There might be some of you who follow Patti Smith’s Substack. It’s something of a spiritual experience, where she communes with her followers about her experiences through photography, poetry, reading or just general conversation.

She has become in a way, a kind of grey-haired godmother to everyone who was once alternative, who may still be, but who has now embraced something perhaps softer and gentler.

This Patti is interesting, because she inhabits so many different worlds, but she is not the Patti Smith that I adore.  For me it’s the beautiful cotton-shirted, slung-jacketed, raven-haired, inscrutable-eyed poet, singer, songwriter and challenger, who stared at me at the dawn of punk from the cover of her debut album Horses.  I tried to see into those eyes to the inside of her head. And tried and tried through the music.

Everyone has albums that changed their lives. I have six or seven, and Horses is one of those.

While live, Patti can still raise the roof, who can be the same force at 78 as they were at 29, when Horses landed with the impact of a million galloping mares? Horses is mature yet youthful, sophisticated, derisory and revealing.

The band is tight, the production by John Cale was fraught with stress. As he said of the process, “an immutable force (Patti) clashed with an immovable object (Cale)”. The result was spectacular, from the sneering opening lines of Gloria to the closing desolation of Elegie. 

I listened to a few of Patti’s lesser-known tracks across her first three albums this week and chose Kimberly, which is the opener of side two of Horses and is about her younger sister, for today’s Friday song.

It starts with an almost naive bass line and drumbeat, before the guitar snakes its way in with building keyboards. And all the time Patti is the vocal driving front force: “and I feel like just some misplaced Joan of Arc”. Kimberly is full of musical and lyrical hooks and a wordy puzzle, testimony to the beginnings of a brilliant 50-year career.

If you don’t know Horses, listen to Kimberly and then go back to the beginning! Happy weekend.

I started a music WhatsApp group in 2023. I send one song a week on a Friday, with links to both Apple and Spotify, and an accompanying narrative/capsule piece. You’ll read it here on a Sunday. If you want to engage about a song, get a playlist or just get in touch, email me on markgrosin@gmail.com.

Listen to Kimberly on Spotify here and Apple Music here.

_{Top image: Currency collage.}