Lenny Kaye has been Patti Smith's guitarist since the early days, when he was a rock critic, and she was doing poetry readings. It all started in 1971, he says: "I went over to the loft where she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe and she read me her poems and I just kind of put some rhythmic energy behind the poems. ... It was not meant to be anything."
Kaye remembers New York City at that time as a hotbed of artistic creativity. "Theater, film, you name it. In that little 10-block circuit of the East Village, so much was happening," he says. "We didn't have a band for another three years. We developed organically, and that to me is what made us so special. We sounded like ourselves by the time we had all the pieces of a real band."
Kaye's collaboration with Smith continues to this day. He credits Smith with teaching him to trust his musical sensibilities — and to always keep evolving. "You have to keep moving forward, you have to be true to your art. You can't be blinded by fame or money," he says.
Now 79, Kaye is releasing his first solo album on July 17. He says the songs on Goin' Local offer a snapshot of his musical consciousness: "I do a lot of things, and a lot of times I kind of duck into somebody else's soundscape. But I thought it was time for me to really understand who I am as an artist."
As for the album's title, that reflects Kaye's love of local music: "Music happens in the local and then sometimes the world discovers it. And I love that pattern and evolution of how music happens totally at the grassroots, one-on-one, and then perhaps gets figured out."
Interview highlights
On his close collaboration with Patti Smith
I always collaborate with Patti. When she's writing a book, she'll often send me works in progress and we'll talk about directions or the correct word. … And she encourages me too, as a writer and as a performer. We are astral twins. I'm so happy about that. That I get to be on her stage left for all these years. I always like to say, I've never seen her sing a false note ever. She always, during the course of a show, tries to make that night special for the audience. And she is my guiding light, my locus of energy.
On what Smith brings out in him
She helped me understand who I am as a musician and how it helped her understand herself as a singer, because Patti learned how to sing on the stage with the band. She also sensed a positive energy in me that I could go anywhere. I'm not hidebound by genre or how things should be done. And Patti, of course, is a creative force that continues to move ever forward. She's not one to rest on her laurels. She wants to see what happens next. And she encourages that in me.
Whatever I've done in the past, great, but what I'm really interested in is getting up and seeing who I am today and as it moves into tomorrow.Lenny Kaye
I'm a worker. That's really what she encouraged in me. She's a worker, too. No matter what we did yesterday, or five years ago, or 10 years ago or at this point, 55 years ago, it's all about the future. She has an expression, "Progress isn't the future, it's keeping up with the present." And so I try to incorporate that in my life. Whatever I've done in the past, great, but what I'm really interested in is getting up and seeing who I am today and as it moves into tomorrow.
On writing "The Things You Leave Behind," a new song about what gets left when we die
I call my accumulation the Museum of Me, because I look at all the books, some of which I'll never read, but I like seeing their spines on the shelf. Of course, the accumulation of records, which is a curation of a sort, and any time I get rid of a record, I want to hear it a week later. I'm in the book and making-records world too, so I'm adding to it. … The song was birthed when someone I knew passed on, and I was given the honorable job of moving their stuff out, and I thought, man, this is a great responsibility to make sure that somebody's sense of curation is honored.
I have a lot of stuff. I mean in my house in Pennsylvania, I have the basement, I have two floors and an attic. And I filled it up. I can't even believe it. I brought everything in there one at a time. There's guitars. There's my body of work, you know, the albums I've created over the years. I don't know. And to be honest, when the time comes and it gets dispersed, I won't know anything about it. I'll be up there with the great file cabinet in the sky, thinking, oh man, I want to hear this record.
On how he believes that despite different genres, music is the same
Music releases us, music elevates us and music illuminates us. And no matter the different styles, this is what I've really found, given all my kind of accessorizing because the basic reasons for a song stay the same: "I want love, I don't have love, I'm sad, I've lost love. Who am I? I'm peeved at the world." All of these things are universal and no matter the decoration or the genre or how it's presented, these are the elements of why we sing. And I'm, of course, quite blessed to be part of those who sing and see it come back to them in the response of the audience.
On changing musically throughout his career
I think it's less age and more experience. I've been through so many musical genres in my time. I've sung to you some of the great crooners. I love country music. I'm a passable pedal steel guitar player. I love heavy music. I have a band called The Drift, my side project, which is kind of a power trio that accesses the darker side of my personality. But I thought that, in a sense, these songs show a personal thing. When I played them for Patti, she said something to me, which I thought was good, she said, "I've never heard you sound like this." And it's kind of something that I've kept private, but I'm also drawing on the experience of playing music for, at this point, nearly 60 years. All the influences that I brought within myself, the romantic side, the kind of social commentary side, all of these things revolve around who I am. I'm all about the future, Terry. I have to say, I have a long list of things I've done in the past, but to me, that's the past. I really like the fact that I've given myself a new persona that I can pursue and understand who I am at this point in my life.
On why he enjoys generation gaps with music
I always hope that there is a generation gap. I don't believe that music was, quote, "better then." Music belongs to the moment. I would not want people to venerate the music that I grew up with, or even that I make now. I believe that music exists as the soundtrack of our present time. And often when I'm in the car, I listen to hit radio. I might not make music like that. I might not even understand how to make music, but I can certainly appreciate the cleverness and the skill that goes into making the hits of the day. And so I would hope that when [my daughter's] kids grow up, they're not gonna be listening to what she did, they are gonna be listening to the music of their generation.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Jacob Ganz adapted it for the web.
Copyright 2026 NPR
