Horses (22) is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith. It was released in November 1975 by Arista Records. 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 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”.
The cover photograph for Horses was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Greenwich Village penthouse apartment of his partner Sam Wagstaff. Smith, shrouded in natural light, is seen wearing a plain white shirt, which she had purchased at a Salvation Army shop on the Bowery, and slinging a black jacket over her shoulder and her favorite black ribbon around her collar. Embedded on the jacket is a horse pin that Allen Lanier had given her. She recalled that Mapplethorpe “took, like, twelve pictures, and at about the eighth one, he said, ‘I have it.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ and he said, ‘I just know,’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ And that was it.” The black-and-white treatment and androgynous pose were a departure from the typical promotional images of female singers of the time.
Horses was met with near-universal acclaim from music critics. Music journalist Mary Anne Cassata said that it was roundly hailed as “one of the most original first albums ever recorded.” Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, John Rockwell wrote that Horses is “wonderful in large measure because it recognizes the overwhelming importance of words” in Smith’s work, covering a range of themes “far beyond what most rock records even dream of.” Rockwell highlighted Smith’s adaptations of “Gloria” and “Land of a Thousand Dances” as the most striking moments on the record, finding that she had rendered the songs “far more expansive than their original creators could have dreamed.
At the time of its release, Horses experienced modest commercial success and placed in the top 50 of the American Billboard 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.
