The musician who considers Florence Welch her “North Star”

“Oh Patricia, you were always my North Star,” Welch sings as the opening line to “Patricia,” an anthemic song that lays her admiration and devotion at the feet of one person: Patti Smith. On her 2018 album High as hopeThe song delves into the ways Smith has always inspired the artist, not just musically but in life and love, and how she has been a living and lasting influence that remains closer to her than anyone else.

“When I High as hopeI thought about how to live creatively, without chaos. Her writing was like a blueprint,” said Welch Rolling Stone. That is such a beautiful and apt way to describe Smith’s written work. In her memoir Children onlyas she moves through the chaos of the New York art scene in the 1970s, Smith somehow appears as a kind of grounding rod, a calm, stoic saint in the midst of the carnage. She has written this book, like many others, now as an adult, reflecting on her younger years. It is full of life, but written in a particularly sensitive and thoughtful style. Anyone who has ever read any of Smith’s work will attest to this, and find her prose utterly hypnotic and unusually comforting for a famous punk figure.

For Welch, it’s Smith’s love of life and survival that moves her most, even in small and seemingly insignificant moments. She said, “She seems to have such a reverence for life that I find so inspiring. I could listen to her write about her morning coffee for pages.” But the more you know about Smith’s life story, the more even something as small as a morning coffee feels like an act of rebellion and celebration. Because she was surrounded by so much loss and tragedy, her ability to write about those small moments of joy, or the quiet times when she’d sit with her notepad in a cafe and watch the world go by, resonate in her writings as big statements about how precious life is.

“You remind me that it’s so wonderful to love,” Welch sings in the song as the ultimate lesson Smith’s art and life have taught her. Throughout the track, the singer gushes about the punk poet, writing the song as a form of thanks or an attempt to grasp her during the recording of an emotionally difficult album that left Welch feeling like she needed all the guidance she could get.

As if by divine providence, the two met by chance in a restaurant when the album was finally released. “She was so kind and sweet. She has this radiant beauty. She’s like an angel, and when she took my hand, I was so shy. She said, ‘I feel like I already know you,'” Welch recalls of the moment her admiration was shared.

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