Patti Smith’s return to Miami brings songs, stories and ‘Bread of Angels’

Patti Smith reads from her book “M Train” during the Miami Book Fair in November 2015. She returns to Miami on Friday, Oct. 9 for an evening of songs and stories inspired by her new book “Bread of Angels” at the Adrienne Arsht Center. (Photo by Carl Juste/courtesy of Miami Herald)

Patti Smith didn’t intend to continue her song and book tour for her memoir release, “Bread of Angels.”

“I was finished, and then they proposed this one,” she says. “I was excited to come to Miami.”

The invitation offered a chance to sing and tell stories in the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House. It was a setting she said she couldn’t pass up.

“An Evening of Songs and Stories with Patti Smith” is at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9, co-presented by the Arsht Center, Books & Books and Miami Book Fair.

“We’ve been doing this in all kinds of halls, old theaters, but to play it in a theater like the Ziff. I couldn’t even believe we were asked to do it.”

Patti Smith in 1995 from the book “Bread of Angels.” (Photo courtesy Penguin Random House)

Smith emerged from New York’s early punk rock scene with her 1975 debut album “Horses” and has since released 10 more studio albums. The singer, songwriter and poet has also built a celebrated literary career. She won the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction for “Just Kids,” about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their beginnings as artists in New York.

In a telephone interview from her home in New York, the conversation, much like her new book, is laced with memories.

Memories of Miami

There was the night in 1978 when she shared a bill with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Miami Jai Alai Fronton, a performance that she continued even after the power was cut.

She and her band were the headliners, and Petty was the opening act. “Yes, I do remember,” she says when asked about the show. “He went on longer than he was supposed to and they had some electrical problem while he was playing. Then he complained he had gotten an electrical shock.”

When his set ran long, her performance went past the venue’s midnight cutoff. After they pulled the power to shut the concert down, the defiant performer stayed onstage, shouting the words to the Who’s “My Generation.”

“By the time that we got on, we were late, and that’s what happened,” she says. “I was a little pissed off, but I had also been out of action for several months after an accident, so I was feisty.”

The accident was during a concert in Tampa in 1977 when she was opening for Bob Seger. She tripped over a monitor and fell from the stage onto a concrete floor leaving her with serious injuries – fractured vertebrae in her neck.

Other visits to Florida were calmer and became part of the life she shared with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of the pioneering rock band MC5.

After they married in 1980, their honeymoon was planned for the Florida Keys, she recalls, but a frightening flight through lightning and thunderstorms delayed their arrival. They landed hours later than expected. “We wound up driving half the night.”

In her book “M Train,” she talks about a two-night Miami stop for their first anniversary. She writes: “We ate red beans and yellow rice in Little Havana and visited Crocodile World.”

Florida became an annual road trip destination from their home in Michigan, she says, with visits to Miami, Daytona Beach, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and the historic Black beach community American Beach.

“We would drive all the way from Detroit,” she says.

Patti Smith spent about 10 years writing “Bread of Angels,” which was published Nov. 4, 2025. The children on the paperback cover are her son Jackson and her niece Simone. Smith was pregnant with daughter Jesse at the time. Photographer T.E. Denton took the picture on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, in 1987. (Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House)

A Reason for A New Book

That life with Fred is one of the reasons Smith decided to write “Bread of Angels.” She hadn’t intended to write another work of nonfiction. “Just Kids” grew out of a promise she made to Mapplethorpe shortly before his death.

“I swore to him that I would write it, and that was a great labor of love,” she says.

But for years, she says, she harbored frustration from unauthorized biographies and speculation about her marriage during the 15 years she and Fred spent in Detroit, where he had grown up and built his music career with MC5. He died at the age of 44 in 1994 of heart failure.

“My life has been pretty amazing,” she says. “I’ve gone through many challenges, and there’s no reason to throw one’s … fantasy about what I was doing at any particular time, or what my husband and I were doing at any particular time, or my children.”

She also wanted to address the assumption that stepping away from public life meant they had stopped working.

Patti Smith with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, in Detroit. (Photo courtesy Penguin Random House)

“Fred and I did all kinds of things. We studied. He became a pilot. I studied all kinds of things,” she says. “I had two children. We had a life.”

As she wrote, the book also became a way to thank the people who shaped her. “The principal thing I believe is gratitude,” she says.

Writing remains what Smith calls her “most beloved vocation.” She begins by hand, filling notebooks that preserve something a computer cannot.

“Sometimes the writing will get very hurried or rushed, or it will take a certain shape because it’s following your adrenaline or your mind,” she says.

Her longtime assistant transcribes the notebooks. “We have worked together for 50 years. She used to be my guitar roadie. She knows my handwriting so well. The creative energy is always done by hand,” she says.

Songs, Stories, and a Birthday Salute

For the Miami evening, those written passages will become part of a conversation with music. Tony Shanahan, her bass player and pianist, gives her the flexibility to choose songs that correspond with a reading or a memory, she says. A selection might be one of her own songs, or “something by Bob Dylan or Neil Young.”

“Sometimes I don’t even read; I’ll just tell a story, and other times I’ll read how the story is written in the book,” she says.

“Because the Night,” the hit song she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen, is one example. She can tell the story of how they wrote it, then perform it with Shanahan.

“The whole night, everything is interconnected,” she says.

Patti Smith and Fred “Sonic” Smith perform at the Palladium in New York in 1979. (Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House)

The date at the Arsht offers another connection. Her recent Milwaukee appearance fell on John Coltrane’s 100th birthday, Sept. 23. Now the Miami event falls on John Lennon’s birthday, Oct. 9.

“We have to think of some way to salute John Lennon as well,” she says.

Although just two performers will be onstage, she says the evenings have the liveliness of a concert. There is room for audiences to sing along, and for stories that move through very different emotions.

“Some stories are funny, others … are more poignant or even heartbreaking,” she says. “There’s a nice range of emotion.”

Chasing The Perfect Prose

Smith, who turns 80 in December, is already in the editing stages of her next book,  “The Melting.”

It is the third in a series of interconnected books that includes “M Train” and “Year of the Monkey.” She describes it as autofiction, with herself as the central character and a story that draws on real facts about climate change.

“It’s the same character as always, me,” she says.

After the responsibility of recounting her life in “Bread of Angels,” returning to fiction brings a sense of freedom.

“I’m back on my horse, you know, riding through, you know, fantasy land,” she says. “I’m free to write whatever I want.”

Throughout the conversation, she recounts writing assignments and moving easily between literature and music.  She mentions writing introductions for a new Modern Library edition of Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” due out in January, and for an edition of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” then recalls working with Shanahan on a song for filmmaker Wim Wenders’ documentary about Pope Francis. “The hardest thing for me is to write lyrics because I don’t think like a musician. I’m a performer, but not really a musician. If I never wrote another song, it wouldn’t be painful to me.”

Patti Smith talked about her “A Book of Days” at the Miami Book Fair on Nov. 18, 2022. ( Photo by Alberto Tamargo, courtesy of AET/Miami Book Fair)

She takes what she does seriously, with each assignment calling for a different approach. Yet, the ambition remains the same.

“I still feel like I haven’t written the book,” and describes wanting to write something as great as “Pinocchio.”

“It’s got like sort of alchemy,” she says. “Everything is in the same story. It’s the one perfect book and that’s always been my goal.”

Whether that ambition is attainable matters less than what it gives her.

“That’s one of the things that keeps me going,” she says. “I want to write something really wonderful.”

WHAT: “An Evening of Songs and Stories With Patti Smith”

WHEN: 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9

WHERE: Ziff Ballet Opera House, Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

COST: $40.02, including fees; each full-price ticket includes a copy of “Bread of Angels.”

INFORMATION: (305) 949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

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