17th...An elegie

Gone Again. Five stars.

Except for a brief return in the 80s, Patti Smith had retired from the music business, opting instead for a private life with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and children. But in the years leading up to 1996, several close friends (Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith Group pianist Richard Sohl) and her brother Todd all passed away. With the loss of her husband, to whom Gone Again is dedicated, she returned to the studio.

Gone Again is an incredibly organic, sincere record. Though themes of death and loss are dealt with in every song, it is neither morbid nor depressing; rather, the underlying emotion seems to be recuperation, renewal of strength and the attempt to make peace with death and also create an adequate tribute to life.

The title track is a powerful attention grabber, and therefore somewhat misleading (as the record afterwards is mostly in a quiet vein). It heralded at the time that after such a long hiatus, Patti Smith could still rock, still capture poetry and still draw on incredible emotional resonance.

Beneath the Southern Cross is acoustically driven, with John Cale on organ and Tom Verlaine on electric guitar, both of which form unobtrusive textures. The song is astonishingly good free verse, but takes time to appreciate, lacking hooks. And listen to the heavenly, pure vocal at the end...That is Jeff Buckley, within a year of his death, making the song chilling, in retrospect.

About a Boy is a lengthy eight minutes, full of atmosphere, washes of guitar far in the background. Patti's vocals are the centerpiece of the entire record. The subject? Kurt Cobain's suicide, and each verse grows more bitter, more angered, as is only fair in the case.

My Madrigal is made of piano, cello and the most emotional of all the lyrics. The refrain is simply "till death do us part" and Patti's voice is at its most beautiful.

Summer Cannibals is oddly placed, being even more abrasive than Gone Again. The catharsis of the take must have been incredible; she practically spits each word out. It's very strong, working on the surreal story of cannibals in Georgia, but (perhaps on purpose) it forms a harsh put down of the romanticism just prior.

Dead to the World is nearly a country song, and Patti adopts a rather severe twang for the telling of the tale, which I found annoying at first...But the sheer appeal of the song, and the fabulous whistling contributed by one Oliver Ray (who I know nothing about) soon won me over, and it is now one of my favorite moments on the album.

For all the shifts in tone and texture, the record is remarkably consistent in its vision. Wing, the only song written for it that does not clearly deal with death or absence, is almost entirely on acoustic guitar.

Ravens features a Spanish inflected mandolin (played by Kimberly Smith, who I can't believe isn't related) and the best poetry included, as it reads good on its own. "All the gifts that God had gave/and those by fate denied/gone to where all treasures laid/and where the raven flies."

At 55 minutes, the CD is longer than is preferable to me, and so we come to the only superfluous song, a cover of Dylan's Wicked Messenger, transforming it into hard rock and obscuring the lyric. Nothing wrong with it - she belts it out - but it is the only weakness to Gone Again.

Fireflies is the other long track, and could never run in any one's head, but the atmosphere conjured is breathtaking. Verlaine, Ray and Buckley are all on it, along with the regular band. The lyric starts in a gospel theme before Patti's muse reasserts itself in a haunting devotional ode.

"This little song is for Fred," she says softly, and lists the chords before playing Farewell Reel, an unaccompanied song that could very well be a first take. It's a fitting end, encapsulating the theme of life making its peace with death.

Gone Again is an essential Patti Smith recording. To me, it is her finest work. The price paid, the degree to which she rose above what must have been incredible pain and the statement hewn from the experience all point to her being on the highest tier available to artists of any order.