http://www.spinner.com/2010/11/15/patti ... new-album/

Patti Smith Recording With Daughter Jesse and Television's Tom Verlaine

Between promotional duties for her memoir 'Just Kids,' rock icon Patti Smith found time to record her 11th studio album, which is due out in 2011. Sessions took place in Italy and France, with a bulk of the recordings done at New York's famed Electric Lady Studio.

"My work on the book sidestepped the album for awhile, but Columbia [Records] has been patient," Smith tells Spinner. "I recorded it with my band and my daughter [Jesse] played piano on it. [Television's] Tom Verlaine played some guitar on it."

For Smith, this album will be her first set of new material since 2004's 'Trampin,' though 2007 did see the release of 'Twelve,' a set of classic and contemporary cover songs.

The new batch of material does have a title, but Smith's mum on that. "It's a secret," she says. "I'm old fashioned. Everyone says people don't do that anymore, but for me, that's still part of the excitement: to keep some things secret and wait for when it's time."

http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/M ... 295721681/

Patti Smith tours U.K., readies new album

LONDON, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- American rocker Patti Smith says she'll be doing some improvisational work and play a gig for the homeless during her current swing through Great Britain.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told The Guardian she would do an improv piece at the Aldeburgh Festival based on the W.G. Sebald poem "After Nature" and do a benefit for the down-and-out at St. Giles Church.

The newspaper said Saturday Smith has been working increasingly with her two children. Her son is a guitar player married to Meg White of the White Stripes. Her daughter, a composer, is taking part in a couple of the shows on the current tour.

Her new album, she said, will be wrapped up next month and was inspired in part by St. Francis of Assisi, a visit to poet Dylan Thomas' home and "The Master and Margarita," an acclaimed anti-Soviet novel written in the 1930s by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov.

¿Hay posibilidad de que Patti Smith grabe nuevo material y si es así en qué dirección iría el nuevo disco?

- La banda y yo terminaremos nuestro decimotercer álbum de estudio este verano. El tema principal de este nuevo trabajo tratará la importancia en el respeto hacia la madre naturaleza, y sobre los cuidados y peligros que alberga la destrucción de nuestro medio ambiente. Será un disco de un rock and roll potente y tengo plena confianza en él.

Comical Babelfish translation:

There is possibility that Patti Smith records new material and if is thus in what direction would go the new disc?

- The band and I will finish ours thirteenth album of east study summer. The main subject of this new work will treat the importance in the respect towards the mother nature, and on the cares and dangers that the destruction of our environment shelters. It will be a disc of a powerful rock and roll and I have total confidence in him.

Patti Smith writes song about Amy Winehouse

Patti Smith has revealed that she has written a song about the late Amy Winehouse.

The punk icon based the track on a poem she had written about the London based soul singer after her death at the age of 27, last July.

Smith told Uncut that the song will appear on her new album. She said:


She added: "We wrote a very nice little song for Amy Winehouse, and I think a beautiful song for Maria Schneider, the actress who was a friend of mine in the '70s. They just happened, like gifts."

Schneider, who starred in Last Tango In Paris, died in February 2011 at the age of 58.

http://www.digitalspy.com/music/news/a3 ... album.html

Patrick Wolf 'moved to tears' by new Patti Smith album

Patrick Wolf has said that he was moved to tears by Patti Smith's new album.

The singer-songwriter, who has played live with Smith on several occasions in recent years, revealed on Twitter that he had heard the unreleased and as-yet untitled record.

Just had a first listen of the new patti smith album in electric lady studios + moved to tears," Wolf said. "Its going to be a classic! Goodbye NYC xx PW ."

Wolf did not confirm whether or not he performed on the record, which will be Smith's first new album release since 2007's covers collection Twelve.

Earlier this month, Smith revealed that she had written a song about Amy Winehouse for the upcoming release.

"We wrote a very nice little song for Amy Winehouse, and I think a beautiful song for Maria Schneider, the actress who was a friend of mine in the '70s," Smith said.

"They just happened, like gifts... The little song for Amy just blossomed in the studio."

In 2010, Smith published her award-winning memoir Just Kids and last year she released the career-spanning compilation album Outside Society.

http://www.chartsinfrance.net/Patti-Smi ... 78950.html

Patti Smith : nouvel album au mois de juin

(Google translated)

Eight years after the release of "Trampin", Patti Smith should make a comeback in stores within weeks. It will publish in June "Banga", an album of unreleased songs that will follow "Twelve", his latest album composed of covers. The album is expected from Sony - Columbia in three formats: standard, deluxe and vinyl. A first single "April Fool" will be sent to radio in a few days. We do not know much about the contents of the disk, except it will contain as a tribute to

Amy Winehouse . The singer recently explained that the song came to him easily: " The little song for Amy bloomed at once in the studio. We were in Electric Lady (a recording studio in New York) just finishing a completely different song when she died. And I wrote a little poem for Amy. My bassist Tony Shanahan, has composed a song and the two went together perfectly. We wrote a really nice little song " The Interpreter "Because The Night" will be in Paris next Wednesday and Thursday to present his album to the media. The singer of 65 years will go on the road this summer with the launch of a world tour. French No date has yet been announced. The muse of the punk movement has occurred recently in Paris including the Olympia and the Church of St. Eustache. For ten years, Sony recalled in a statement that although the singer has just signed new songs, it is has remained: " Between his exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, his role as editor of "Liberation", a concert at St Eustache and his memory book "Just Kids" that won the National Book Award for non- in 2010 fiction ".

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 76345.html

Patti Smith to Release Banga on June 5

"APRIL FOOL" DIGITAL SINGLE ON SALE NOW
NEW YORK, April 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Patti Smith has announced the June 5th release of her eleventh studio album, Banga. This highly-anticipated album marks Smith's first collection of original material since 2004, when she made her Columbia Records debut with the critically-acclaimed trampin'. 'April Fool,' the first single from Banga, (featuring Tom Verlaine) is available digitally today.

Banga was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City and produced by Patti Smith and her band: Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty and her long-time collaborator Lenny Kaye. Featured guests include Tom Verlaine, Jack Petruzzelli, Smith's son Jackson and daughter Jesse Paris.

Inspired by Smith's unique dreams and observations, Banga's poetic lyrics are a reflection of our complex world – a world that is rife with chaos and beauty. Praised for her storytelling abilities, Smith has crafted an album that captures a wide range of human experience.

There is an exploratory spirit in the songs that make up Banga, including a melodic overture imagining the voyage of Amerigo Vespucci to the New World in 1497 (Amerigo), a rock song for the people of Japan in the wake of last year's earthquake (Fuji-san), a classic ballad in memory of Amy Winehouse (This Is The Girl), an improvised meditation on art and nature (Constantine's Dream) as well as a birthday song written for her friend Johnny Depp (Nine).

Patti Smith has received widespread recognition for her 2010 book, Just Kids, the story of her deep friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their effect on each other as burgeoning artists. Just Kids earned Smith the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction as well as an enormous new following. Listeners of all generations will surely relate to the hope, humor, and humanity of Patti Smith's adventurous new album.

The full track listing for Banga is as follows:

1. Amerigo
2. Fuji-san
3. April Fool
4. This Is The Girl
5. Banga
6. Maria
7. Tarkovsky (The Second Stop is Jupiter)
8. Mosaic
9. Nine
10. Seneca
11. Constantine's Dream
12. After the Gold Rush

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/the-view-fr ... atti-smith

An Audience With Patti Smith

“I feel like a stand-up comic who’s not getting any laughs,” says Patti Smith self-deprecatingly, as she presents a playback of her new album, Banga, to a specially invited audience in London. This is the first time anyone has listened to the record, she tells us – not even the band or Patti's record company have yet had the privilege of hearing it. The venue for this auspicious event is the old Scotch Of St James club in Mayfair, the principal hang out for Swinging London’s finest. The Jimi Hendrix Experience played their first UK gig here, and Patti is keen to flag up her own connections with Hendrix: “This album was recorded at Electric Lady Studios,” she explains. “It’s the same studio where we recorded [Smith's debut album] Horses. I’m even wearing an official Electric Lady t-shirt…”

Patti thrives off these kinds of connections. As she talks through the stories behind each of Banga’s 12 tracks, it becomes clear that many important symmetries, references and associations resonate through the album - among them, the lives and achievements of artists, explorers, A-list film stars, emperors and saints. The June 5 release date for Banga, Patti acknowledges, also happens to be the same date that she released her first single, “Piss Factory”, and the birthday of the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca. Furthermore, Banga, she highlights, is named after a dog in the novel The Master And Margarita by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. “You might say, why name an album after a dog?” she asks rhetorically. “I dunno. I like dogs. I can’t really have one in New York, so I compensated by naming my album after a dog.”

Meanwhile, the album’s second track, “April Fool”, connects to the April 1 birth date of another Russian, this time Nikolai Gogol. There’s a further birthday connection on “Nine”, which nods to the June 9 birth date of Patti’s friend Johnny Depp. “The song was a birthday present to Johnny,” admits Patti. “I went to visit him in Puerto Rico when he was filming The Rum Diary. It was his birthday and I didn’t have a present, so I wrote him a song.” Depp himself appears on the album’s title track, along with Patti’s son Jackson, who delivers an impressive impression of a dog.

As you might imagine, Patti’s stories are often marvelous. There are little asides that leave you wanting more – about the track “Maria”, for instance, Patti says it was written about the actress Maria Schneider, who died last February: “She was friend of mine in the Seventies. I’m not prone to nostalgia, but this is about the feel of that time. When we recorded Horses, Maria traveled with us for a while.” But the best story of the night hangs around a ballad called “Seneca”. Ostensibly a lullaby for her godson, Seneca Sebring, the song was written during a trip on board an Italian cruise ship in the company of her long-term guitarist Lenny Kaye and the film director, Jean-Luc Godard. Godard, it transpires, invited them to cameo in his 2010 movie, Film Socialisme. Patti recalls spending 10 days “with 3,000 raging Italians” taking in the sights of Alexandria and Cyprus along the way. For the punch line, she reveals that boat was the cruise ship Costa Concordia… which made headlines in January when it sank off the coast of Tuscany.

Indeed, it seems that Patti has a story for everything. “Amerigo” is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer after whom America is named. The song is a co-write with bassist Tony Shanahan, who taught her how to sing in a proper key. “That famous nasal sound I have,” she says, “it’s just a Jersey girl singing in the wrong key.”
“Fuji-San”, is “a rock’n’roll prayer for the people of Japan after the tsunami… To ask Mount Fuji to look after the Japanese people.”

As she told me at the end of last year when I spoke to her for our 2012 Album preview, “This Is My Girl” was written in the wake of Amy Winehouse’s death. “She was the same age as my own children,” Patti acknowledges tonight. “It was a song I wish we didn’t have to write.”

The storming free jazz happening of “Tarkovsky” is “a jam off a Sun-Ra phrase, ‘The Second Stop Is Jupiter’. My son Jackson is on it and my daughter Jesse plays piano. It’s named after Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Ivan’s Childhood, the most beautiful movie about war.”

The album’s centrepiece is a sprawling, impressionistic improvised track called “Constantine’s Dream”, which references the Holy Roman Emperor Constantine, Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and Christopher Columbus. After Lenny Kaye laid down his improvised backing track, Patti “studied, thought and then improvised a vocal… It’s about the environment, materialism. I thought about St Francis of Assisi, who was such a beautiful person.”

The album closes with an understated cover of Neil Young’s “After The Goldrush”, whose eco-themes refer back to Patti’s meditations on “Constantine’s Dream”. She’s unusually cagey about the track, though she admits Young hasn’t heard it yet.

The playback over, Patti gets a little emotional – “it’s like letting children go,” she sighs with a snuffle. She apologises, too, for a glitch on the CD that meant “Seneca” skipped. “They asked me if I could put the album on an iPod,” she deadpans, holding up the CD. “But I didn’t think it would fit. I guess I’m just a little behind the times…”

Banga is released by Sony on June 5