At 79, the accomplished guitarist Lenny Kaye has nothing left to prove and, somehow, a debut solo album to introduce.
On Tuesday night at the City Winery Loft’s Grammy Museum in New York City, Kaye took the stage with Michael Imperioli to celebrate the upcoming release of his debut solo album, Goin’ Local, which arrives on July 17. At the Grammy Museum event, the Patti Smith Group guitarist performed emotionally laden songs from his upcoming album, integrated stories from his book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments into the performance, and discussed his creative process with Imperioli. Although Kaye presented himself with the humility of someone starting fresh, he maintained the authenticity and confidence of someone who knows that they’ve evolved tastefully over time.
Lenny Kaye and Michael Imperioli
Rob Kim/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Kaye has spent more than half a century defining rock & roll from nearly every angle: guitarist, writer, producer, curator, historian. While he’s best known as the “godfather of garage rock,” a name earned by compiling the Nuggets album of Original Artyfacts of the First Psychedelic Era, he’s also known for being a founding member and integral part of the Patti Smith Group (Smith was in attendance on Tuesday, proudly embracing him onstage). In addition, he’s a successful record producer, critic, memoirist, and occasional co-conspirator with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Suzanne Vega.
Kaye with Patti Smith
Rob Kim/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
While the event could’ve purely looked back on past accomplishments — which, of course, are worth celebrating — it was instead future-focused and filled with emotional wisdom, emphasizing how his past has impacted the creative process behind his upcoming album. The evening felt like an intimate mirror of his inner world, a refreshingly raw self-portrait of sorts, rather than a formal album launch.
He performed several songs, but “The Things You Leave Behind,” one of the night’s most sentimental songs, was delivered with an unhurried emotional lucidity. The song is about the accumulation of objects and memorabilia, the little artifacts a person gathers over decades, and the question of what becomes of them as time marches forward. With just his voice and a guitar, coupled with simple lyrics — direct without being blunt, tender without curdling into sentimentality — Kaye seemed to understand that if you clear enough brush away from a song, the feeling has nowhere to hide.
The pivot from his usual garage rock to softer string plucking ended up doubling as a thesis statement for the whole evening: strip away the bombast, the entourage, and see what’s left when the man is alone with just his voice and a guitar.
Alongside the self-reflection surrounding “The Things You Leave Behind,” he also reminded everyone that he’s one hell of a guitarist. Right before the end of the event, Kaye tore into a solo that came ripping through the room like a flare, sudden and scorching and gloriously unsentimental. Kaye’s new songs may be introspective, but his instincts remain feral in the best way.
Prior to his performance, Kaye sat down with Imperioli to discuss his songwriting process. Music, he said, “helped explain myself to myself,” and he spoke about letting the song come to fruition, about not setting out to write so much as waiting for it to arrive.
“I believe a song exists because there is a need for it to be written, to explain the dynamics of the human relationship, to look at yourself as if in a mirror, and get in touch with a deeper emotion, one that needs to be sung,” he said. “I wanted to call the shots on this album. I wanted to … find my way so that I could show my true voice. It was important to me not to filter it through anybody’s preconceptions.”
After wrapping up his discussion with Imperioli, Kaye began the performance portion of the night with an excerpt from his book, delving into what New York’s music scene was like in 1975. Describing the city’s best rock locations in gritty detail to put his song into context, he directly followed the reading with a passionate performance of “Goin’ Local.”
Kaye wove in readings between the songs he performed, which included “Poppy,” “World Book Night,” and “Yes I Will.” Instead of breaking the set’s momentum, the literature only deepened it, making it feel like a campfire sermon from someone who’s spent his life moving between the page and the stage. A sentence would drift out into the room and hang there; then a guitar chord would chase it like an afterthought, or an answer. He kept the mood genuine, tossing in bits of humor and understatement, but there was a current of sentiment running underneath the whole evening.
On Tuesday, Kaye delivered more than a victory lap. It was something looser and better: A warm, funny, deeply personal night built around stories and the stubbornly unflashy idea that one guitar and a voice can still get to the heart of things.
