Patti Smith: Songs and Stories
An evening with Patti Smith spanning music, poetry, visual art, and memoir — the punk poet laureate in an intimate setting at Sydney Goldstein Theater.
Why we picked this
Patti Smith in a small theater is a different thing than Patti Smith on a stage — she moves between song and prose and memory in a way that doesn't translate to recording.
Patti Smith’s career spans five decades and refuses easy categorization. She arrived in New York in the early 1970s as a poet and became the godmother of punk by making poetry electric. Her National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids revealed the depth of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe and became one of the great accounts of artistic youth and New York bohemia. M Train extended that memoir tradition into something more elusive and beautiful.
An evening of songs and stories means Smith moving between registers — performance, reflection, narrative — in the way she does best. The format suits her. She has always been as much a storyteller as a singer, and Sydney Goldstein Theater’s intimate scale puts the audience close enough to feel the difference.
For anyone who has lived with her work, and for anyone curious about what a genuine artist looks like from the inside.