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Horses is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith. It was released by Arista Records on November 10, 1975. A fixture of the mid-1970s underground rock music scene in New York City, Smith signed to Arista in 1975 and recorded Horses with her band at Electric Lady Studios in August and September of that year. She enlisted former Velvet Underground member John Cale to produce the album. The music on Horses was informed by the minimalist aesthetic of the punk rock genre, then in its formative years. Smith and her band composed the album's songs using simple chord progressions, while also breaking from punk tradition in their propensity for improvisation and embrace of ideas from avant-garde and other musical styles. Smith's lyrics on Horses were alternately rooted in her own personal experiences, particularly with her family, and in more fantastical imagery. The album also features adaptations of the rock standards "Gloria" and "Land of a Thousand Dances". At the time of its release, Horses experienced modest commercial success and placed in the top 50 of the American Billboard 200 albums chart, while being widely acclaimed by music critics. Recognized as a seminal recording in the history of punk and later rock movements, Horses has frequently appeared in professional lists of the greatest albums of all time. In 2009, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation into the National Recording Registry as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" work. Background Through frequent live performances over the previous year, by 1975 Patti Smith and her band had established themselves as a popular act within the New York City underground rock music scene. Further increasing their popularity was their highly attended two-month residency at the New York City club CBGB with the band Television early that year. The hype surrounding the residency brought Smith to the attention of music industry executive Clive Davis, who was scouting for talent to sign to his recently launched label Arista Records. After being impressed by one of her live performances at CBGB, Davis offered Smith a seven-album recording deal with Arista, and she signed to the label in April 1975. Smith's vision for her debut album was, in her words, "to make a record that would make a certain type of person not feel alone. People who were like me, different ... I wasn't targeting the whole world. I wasn't trying to make a hit record." The title Horses reflected Smith's desire for a rejuvenation of rock music, which she found had grown "calm" in reaction to the social turmoil of the 1960s and the deaths of numerous prominent rock musicians. She elaborated: "Psychologically, somewhere in our hearts, we were all screwed up because those people died ... We all had to pull ourselves together. To me, that's why our record's called Horses. We had to pull the reins on ourselves to recharge ourselves ... We've gotten ourselves back together. It's time to let the horses loose again. We're ready to start moving again." Recording Arista arranged for Smith to begin recording Horses in August 1975. Smith initially suggested that the album should be produced by Tom Dowd. Plans were made to book studio time with Dowd at Criteria in Miami, but these were complicated by his relationship with rival label Atlantic Records. Smith had a change of heart, and instead set out to enlist Welsh musician John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, to produce Horses, for she was impressed by the raw sound of his solo albums, such as 1974's Fear. Cale, who had previously seen Smith perform live and was acquainted with her bassist Ivan Král, accepted. Horses was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, with Smith retaining the same backing band with whom she performed live—Jay Dee Daugherty on drums, Lenny Kaye on guitar, Ivan Král on bass guitar, and Richard Sohl on keyboards. Cale recalled that the band initially "sounded awful" and played out of tune due to their use of damaged instruments, forcing him to procure the band new instruments before work on the album began. The differences between the work ethics of Cale, who was an experienced recording artist, and of Smith, who at this point was primarily a live performer, became apparent early on in recording, and were a source of tension between the two artists, who frequently argued in the studio. Guest musicians on Horses were Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult and Tom Verlaine of Television. Cale had wished to augment the band's playing on certain songs with strings, but Smith vehemently opposed this idea. Lanier, who was Smith's boyfriend at the time, did not get along with Cale, nor—particularly so—with Verlaine. This tension culminated with Lanier and Verlaine getting into a physical altercation during the final recording session, held on September 18. By the end of recording, and for some years immediately following the album's release, Smith was quick to downplay Cale's contributions and suggested that she and her band had ignored his suggestions entirely. In a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, Smith described her experience: My picking John was about as arbitrary as picking Rimbaud. I saw the cover of Illuminations with Rimbaud's face, y'know, he looked so cool, just like Bob Dylan. So Rimbaud became my favorite poet. I looked at the cover of Fear and I said, 'Now there's a set of cheekbones.' In my mind I picked him because his records sounded good. But I hired the wrong guy. All I was really looking for was a technical person. Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting and instead I got a mirror. It was really like A Season in Hell, for both of us. But inspiration doesn't always have to be someone sending me half a dozen American Beauty roses. There's a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim. And he had me so nuts I wound up doing this nine-minute cut that transcended anything I ever did before. Cale said in 1996 that Smith initially struck him as "someone with an incredibly volatile mouth who could handle any situation", and that as producer on Horses he wanted to capture the energy of her live performances, noting that there "was a lot of power in Patti's use of language, in the way images collided with one another." He described their working relationship during recording as "confrontational and a lot like an immutable force meeting an immovable object." Smith would later attribute much of the tension between herself and Cale to her inexperience with formal studio recording, recalling that she was "very, very suspicious, very guarded and hard to work with" and "made it difficult for him to do some of the things he had to do." She expressed gratitude for Cale's persistence in working with her and her band, and found that his production on Horses made the most out of their "adolescent and honest flaws". Musical style Smith characterized Horses.... Discover the Patti Delano popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Patti Delano books.