Horses (1975)

Horses is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith, released on November 10, 1975 by Arista Records. Smith, supported by her regular backing band, recorded the album at Electric Lady Studios in September 1975, choosing former Velvet Underground member John Cale as the album's producer.

The music on Horses was informed by the minimalist aesthetic of the punk rock genre, then in its formative years. Smith and her band composed the album's songs using simple chord progressions, while also breaking from punk tradition in their propensity for improvisation and embrace of ideas from avant-garde and other musical styles. With Horses, Smith drew upon her backgrounds in rock music and poetry, aiming to create an album combining both forms. Her lyrics were alternately rooted in her own personal experiences, particularly with her family, and in more fantastical imagery. Horses was additionally inspired by Smith's reflections on the previous era of rock music—with two of its songs being adapted in part from 1960s rock standards, and others containing lyrical allusions and tributes to past rock performers—and her hopes for the music's future.

At the time of its release, Horses experienced modest commercial success and reached the top 50 of the Billboard 200 album chart, while being widely acclaimed by music critics. Recognized as a seminal recording in the history of punk and later rock movements, Horses has appeared in numerous lists of the greatest albums of all time. In 2009, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation into the National Recording Registry as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" work.

Background

Patti Smith and her backing band gave frequent live performances throughout 1974, and by the following year they had established themselves as a popular act within the New York City underground rock music scene, especially elevated in early 1975 by their highly attended two-month residency at the New York City club CBGB with the band Television. The hype surrounding the residency brought Smith to the attention of music industry executive Clive Davis, who was scouting for artists to sign to his recently launched label Arista Records. After being impressed by one of her live performances at CBGB, Davis offered Smith a seven-album recording deal with Arista, and she signed to the label in April 1975.

Smith had written poetry for several years before becoming a musician, and entered the music industry because she thought "the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough". For her debut album, her primary aim was to merge poetry and rock music, which then developed into a "larger mission" to "pump blood back into the heart of rock'n'roll". The title Horses reflected Smith's desire for a rejuvenation of rock music, which she found had grown "calm" in reaction to the social turmoil of the 1960s and the deaths of numerous prominent rock musicians of that era. "Psychologically, somewhere in our hearts," she stated shortly after the album's release, "we were all screwed up because those people died ... We all had to pull ourselves together. To me, that's why our record's called Horses. We had to pull the reins on ourselves to recharge ourselves ... We've gotten ourselves back together. It's time to let the horses loose again. We're ready to start moving again."