Ms. Smith is often described as “the godmother of punk.” But even during her first flush of fame in the mid-1970s, when she was a galvanizing presence at gritty downtown venues like CBGB, she had a radiant sentimental streak, a precocious awareness of time passed and passing.
She begins “Words and Music,” which is being recorded as part of the Audible theater program, by wishing her audience “Happy autumn equinox,” a salutation she follows with the poem “Autumn Day” by Rainer Maria Rilke. “The summer was immense,” she reads, and one woman’s bright, storied history seems to hover before us.
Ms. Smith captured long stretches of that history in two lyrical autobiographies, “Just Kids” (2010), an account of her early days in New York with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), and “M Train” (2015), about life with and after her husband, the musician Fred (Sonic) Smith (1948-1994). She keeps paperback editions of both books, marked with slips of paper, close at hand to read from. And two long-dead men, whose names she speaks with proprietary pride, become electrically present in their absence.
The production inevitably brings to mind another memoir of a show, the current hit “Springsteen on Broadway,” in which the rock star Bruce Springsteen alternates recitations from his autobiography with introspective performances of his songs. Mr. Springsteen collaborated with Ms. Smith in writing the ballad that became her one Top 40 hit, “Because the Night” (1978), a number she performs here as a hypnotic rhapsody.
“Words and Music,” though, is a much cozier affair than “Springsteen on Broadway.” The homey, lived-in-looking set was assembled by Jesse Paris Smith, and includes the family’s battered-looking “sacred chair,” as well as a shabby orange sofa. (Ms. Smith pauses over the color choice, but then concludes that its evocation of pumpkins is appropriate to the autumn theme.)
