Wave

Sound DNA

• Punk
• Punk Rock

• gritty
• defiant
• poetic

About

When Patti Smith walked into Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, in 1979 to begin work on <i>Wave</i>, she knew it would be her last record for a while—perhaps <i>ever</i>. She hadn’t yet shared this information with the rest of her band, but she <i>had</i> told producer, musician, and longtime friend Todd Rundgren. While not significantly stylistically different than <i>Easter</i>, her 1978 breakthrough, <i>Wave</i> continued to favor a polished, commercial-sounding production that would (hopefully) let Smith find success with FM radio. <i>Easter</i> had given Smith a bona fide smash with “Because the Night,” which had been languishing as an unfinished Bruce Springsteen track until <i>Easter</i> producer Jimmy Iovine got the song into Smith’s hands. There’s nothing the singer’s label, Arista, would have liked more than for Smith to come up with another hit in the same vein—especially since she was still just a few years removed from her divisive 1976 album <i>Radio Ethiopia</i>. And while <i>Wave</i>, recorded with the Patti Smith Group, had moments that were more conceptual than commercial—at one point during recording, Smith asked Richard Sohl to make his keyboard sound like the ocean—there turned out to be three legitimate radio-friendly unit-shifters on the album. The first single, “Frederick,” is a charmingly and blatantly Motown-inspired love song to the man she would marry about a year later, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. And the haunting “Dancing Barefoot” would later become one of Patti’s trademark tunes—and the one song most frequently covered by other musicians. Elsewhere on the album, the fury behind the Patti Smith Group’s cover of The Byrd’s “So You Want to Be (A Rock ’n’ Roll Star)”—and its stream-of-consciousness improv—was inspired by Smith’s experiences with the machinery of stardom. But it was also informed by what Smith and her bandmates considered to be the decline and fall of punk rock—the genre they’d helped perfect and popularize—when Patti’s brother was attacked with a bottle by none other than the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. Punk was dead, the 1970s were coming to a close, and Smith would soon take an extended break from music. <i>Wave</i> was a farewell—at least for now.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits