After 55 years of collaboration, Lenny Kaye still managed to surprise Patti Smith when he played her his new album, Goin’ Local, due July 29. “I never heard you sound like this,” she told him.
The album marks Kaye’s belated official debut as a solo artist at age 79, following a wildly diverse career — in addition to his decades-long gig as Smith’s guitarist and key collaborator, he’s written numerous books, produced artists from Suzanne Vega to Soul Asylum, and compiled the legendary garage-rock boxed set Nuggets. “I’ve always written songs,” Kaye says. “Sometimes they’re very personal. Sometimes I do them for my own amusement. The timing? As Orson Welles said, there is no wine before its time. I can really sometimes only concentrate on one side of my personality at a time. And of course, with the writing of the books and the work with Patti and all the other things that I do, it always seems that I was the last person to move to the priority list.”
Smith probably won’t be the only listener surprised by the album, which combines some downtown rock with gentle, playful story-songs that swerve towards an almost Buddy Holly-ish melodic sweetness. There’s also a lovely Smith co-write, the poppy, mid-tempo “Solstice.” “Some of the stuff is very emotional and tender in a way that sometimes people might not think of me,” says Kaye. “I’m known for garage rock, quote unquote, which I always celebrate and honor. But that was the music I made when I was a teenager. I’ve certainly grown past that in many ways.”
The touchstones for the album’s softer material, Kaye says, include Townes Van Zandt, Eric Andersen, Kevin Kinney of Drivin’ N Cryin’, and Alejandro Escovedo. He was also affected by his Eighties work producing another singer-songwriter. “Working with Suzanne Vega,” he says, “taught me the beauty of the acoustic guitar, the simple intimacy of picking with your fingers and allowing the song to emerge.”
The solo-debut designation does come out with an asterisk, since Kaye released the harder-hitting I’ve Got A Right, under the band name Lenny Kaye Connection, in 1984, during the time Smith took off from music. “That was kind of a band,” Kaye says.”Since that’s 40 years in the past, I guess this is my solo debut for this millennium…. I do feel like a new artist… Whatever I did in the past, especially in the band world, was a different era for me. I feel like I’m moving into the future, which is a great blessing.”
Six of the album’s tracks began in abortive sessions in the 2010s with Patti Smith Group bassist Tony Shanahan. Two years ago, Kaye started going into a studio near his Pennsylvania home to finish what he’d begun and add new material. “Some of the songs go back 15 years, 20 years,” Kaye says. “Sometimes I confront a younger version of myself. I think the title song, ‘Goin’ Local,’ is when I was a bit more of a wild animal on the Lower East Side than I am now.”
Among the most moving tracks on the album is the collector’s lament “The Things You Leave Behind.” “I go down to my basement and I see mounds of great stuff,” he says. “It’s really hard. Look at that piece of memorabilia, or here’s some sheet music I got sometime. And then I go upstairs and there’s the guitar room with great guitars and amplifiers. Of course all the books…. That song was sparked by two or three or four people who suddenly leave this world — and what happens to this stuff? That’s what my daughter asks me all the time: ‘Dad, better get it out of the house.’”
The album’s final track, “Yes I Will,” has lyrics written by Kaye’s uncle, the late Larry Kusic, a successful Hollywood songwriter whose credits included “Speak Softly Love,” the English-language love theme from The Godfather, and “A Time for Us,” the love theme from the 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet. It’s not their first collaboration. In 1966, Kusic asked a 19-year-old Kaye to sing on a folk-protest song he’d just written with Richie Adams, “Crazy Like A Fox.” It was Kaye’s first recording, released under the name Link Cromwell. Returning to that collaboration “really touches me deeply,” Kaye says.
Kaye will play some solo acoustic shows in the spring with Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, as well as one festival date on his own. “I actually enjoy that mode of presentation because you can really get inside your songs,” he says. “ I’m just up there with my guitar, my songs, and my sense of humor.”
Lenny Kaye Tour Dates
April 25 – Avalon – Easton, MD
April 26 – Rams Head – Annapolis, MD
April 27 – The Birchmere – Alexandria, VA
April 29 – City Winery – New York, NY
April 30 – The Ardmore – Ardmore, PA
May 2 – Levon Helm Studios – Woodstock, NY
May 5 – Iron Horse – Northampton, MA
May 6 – Bull Run – Shirley, MA
May 8 – 3S Artspace – Portsmouth, NH
May 9 – Opera House – Bellows Falls, VT
June 26 – Dex Fest – Carrboro, NC
June 27 – Dex Fest – Carrboro, NC
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