Patti Smith first released her volume of Complete Lyrics in 1998. As her seminal porto-punk album Horses turns 40, her new edition Patti Smith — Collected Lyrics 1970-2015 fills in the minor gaps of its predecessor. If you fiend for the fruit of the icon’s pen, this is the one to swoop up.
This update comes with 35 more songs, including her first track written for Janis Joplin, “Work Song,” as well as the as-of-yet unreleased “The Writer’s Song,” due in October 27 via Ecco Press in the States.
The latter may or may not borrow some material from her poem of the same name released in 2005 in her collection Auguries of Innocence. Hopefully it does, as the homage to poetry pretty much validates in its final breaths everything we do here for the lyric:
