Patti Smith

2008 five CD box. The Original Album Classics series, courtesy of Sony/BMG, packages together five classic albums from one of the most popular artists on the label's roster, housing them in an attractive slipcase. This set from the Alt-Rock icon features the albums Horses (1975), Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978), Wave (1979) and Dream of Life (1988).

Banga is the eleventh studio album by American rock musician Patti Smith, released on June 1, 2012 on Columbia Records. Recorded throughout 2011 at New York's Electric Lady Studios and Hoboken's Hobo Recorders, Banga was produced by Smith, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty and collaborator Lenny Kaye. The album includes a number of guest musicians including Tom Verlaine of Television, Italian band Casa del Vento, Jack Petruzzelli and Smith's own children, Jackson and Jesse Paris.

November 2005 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Patti Smith's debut album, Horses, a groundbreaking rock & roll masterpiece which continues its unparalleled influence on rock music, style and culture. Arista/Columbia/Legacy Recordings will celebrate this musical milestone with the release of Horses/Horses, a two-disc Legacy Special Edition of Patti Smith's debut album, on Tuesday, November 8…

The big difference between Patti Smith's four 1970s albums and this return to action after nine years lies in the choice of collaborator. Where Smith's main associate earlier had been Lenny Kaye, a deliberately simple guitarist, here her co-writer and co-producer (with Jimmy Iovine) was her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, formerly of the MC5, who played guitar with a conventional rock competence and who lent his talents to each of the tracks, giving them a mainstream flavor…

Nearly 30 years and nine albums in, Patti Smith shows no signs of giving up, or giving in, despite the fact she expected to be quietly doing her work instead of making rock & roll albums and playing in front of audiences. But then 9/11, Afghanistan, war in Iraq. Smith lives the vocation of a poet in an old-world sense of that word. Once, bards were the gadflies of society. Smith's Trampin' is a work that directly evolves from that tradition and fits squarely in her oeuvre. Trampin' is Smith's first outing for new label Columbia. She and her bandmates – Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Tony Shanahan, and Oliver Ray – walk the tightrope between in-your-face garage rock, poetic ballads, and raucous, improvisational pieces (à la "Radio Ethiopia")…

After years of silence, Patti Smith returned to music with a series of concerts in late 1995. It had been years since she had performed live – for most of the '80s and '90s, she concentrated on domestic life. Following the death of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, in early 1995, Smith began playing music in public again and those concerts eventually led to the triumphant comeback Gone Again. Her husband wasn't the only loved one Smith lost between 1988's Dream of Life and 1996's Gone Again – her brother and her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe both died.