Review: Lenny Kaye – Goin’ Local
Lenny Kaye – Goin’ Local
Format: CD / Vinyl
Label: YepRoc
Release: 2026
Text: Tom Wouters
Lenny Kaye is best known as the founding member and guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, with whom he made the epochal album, Horses, more than fifty years ago. But Kaye has earned some credits as a music producer too, he produced the likes of Suzanne Vega, Soul Asylum, Microdisney, Kristin Hersh and beat poet Allan Ginsberg. And he is equally known as a writer, he co-wrote Waylon Jennings’ Autobiography. Through the years he had written his own songs, which he occasionally recorded together with his long time bandmate from The Patti Smith Group, bass player Tony Shanahan.
Two years ago he decided to complete the record becoming his first solo album, Goin’ Local. As a writer, Kaye, not unlike Patti Smith, pays a lot of attention to the lyrics. The lyrics in Kaye’s songs are dealing with daily life (“ We’ve all been there, loves lost, loves found, loves that are ill-fated, loves eternal, loves one never forgets, moments to treasure and relive, if only in memory”). Kaye sings them as a real storyteller, suited by the sparse instrumentation that we also know from the Patti Smith Group.
Goin’ Local opens with the title song, in which is immediately clear that Kaye and Shanahan are co-responsible for the sound of the Patti Smith Group (PSG-drummer Jay Dee Daugherty also features on the album). Sparse, guitar-dominated instrumentation with a strong focus on the lyrics. In This Love the New York post-punk sound is manifest, too.
If I Were You features John Jackson of the Jayhawks on mandolin and is followed by the beautiful Let’s Make A Memory, featuring jazz pianist Matthew Shipp and vocalist Lisa Burns(The Lovin’ Kind). Long time companion Patti Smith appears as co-writer of Solstice, which could have been appeared at any PSG record.
Another highlight is Pennsylvania Girls, a hymn to the ladies of that state, where proto-New Yorker Kaye currently resides, after finding a Pennsylvania Girl of his own. It is a tenderly sung song, featuring Tim Carbone (Railroad Earth) on violin. The Things You Leave Behind is a post-punk rock song and Goin’ Local is concluded with Yes I Will, with the lyrics written by Kaye’s uncle Larry Kusik.
The song is dedicated to Andy Paley, the lead singer of The Sidewinders, a band that Kaye once produced. Paley should orchestrate the song but sadly died before. His work was taken over by arranger David Mansfield, who wrote the beautiful mellotron part that ends the song.
Goin’ Local is a very interesting solo album by one of the godfathers of the New York post-punk sound, Lenny Kaye and an absolute must for all Patti Smith fans.
Tracks:
01. Goin’ Local
02.This Love
03. If I Were You
04. Let’s Make a Memory
05. A Friend Like You
06. Be That As It May (May Day)
07. Solstice
08. World Book Night
09. Pennsylvania Girls
10. Poppy
11. The Things You Leave Behind
12. Yes I Will
Website: www.yeproc.com