At New York's Bowery Ballroom on December 30th -- her fifty-seventh birthday -- Patti Smith led a cheering crowd through two hours of rock and righteousness: readings from Allen Ginsberg's Howl; calls to register, vote and oust George W. Bush; and anthems old and new, from "Rock n Roll Nigger" and "People Have the Power" to "Gandhi," a fiery, improvised epic from her new album, Trampin'. Then Smith sent everyone home with a special New Year's promise: "It's going to be a hard year, a vicious year, but we don't care, because we're going to be happy motherfuckers!"

"I refuse to be unhappy," Smith explains three months later, sitting in her art studio in Lower Manhattan, where she works on her poetry, drawings and photographs. "I have moments when I feel brokenhearted, disappointed in the things people do -- the atrocities, stupidity and greed. But through it all, I bounce back up -- happy and lucky to be alive."

Trampin' is Smith's first album for Columbia and a magnificent state-of-the-nation address, veering from frank reflection to outright fight with the force and hallelujah of her classic 1975 debut, Horses. She produced Trampin' with her mighty band of the last decade: guitarists Lenny Kaye and Oliver Ray, bassist Tony Shanahan and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. But the record ends warmly with just Smith and her daughter Jesse on piano, performing the Marian Anderson hymn "Trampin'." "The record goes through all these changes," Smith says, "then there is this little song. The narrator is just trampin' -- to the highest place. I like the modesty of it and the heightened optimism. It makes me feel everything's gonna be OK."

In your liner notes to the 2002 compilation Land, you wrote, "I leave you with these fleeting thoughts. . . . Farewell, friends." That sounded like goodbye -- for good.

I was saying goodbye. Arista, my company for twenty-seven years, was no longer interested in me. I didn't know what was going to happen. But I didn't feel the work of the band was complete. We would have continued working live. We're a strong band, and with the things happening in the world, it was important to go out and confront them. For me, the night [of a performance] is always a mix of human concerns and global concerns -- and there are a lot of global concerns.

Who do you hope to reach with the concerns of Trampin' ?

When I recorded Horses, I was trying to reach people like myself. I was a wallflower in school -- an outsider, disenfranchised. I understood how people felt alone. On Horses, I wanted them to know they were not alone. Now I will address anyone who will listen. I can relate to Thomas Paine. When he wrote Common Sense, he was trying to stir people up, get them thinking. And he did. Paine's words -- "These are the times that try men's souls" -- became the battle cry of the American Revolution. I can relate to a person like that, who has this calling and does the work.

The albums you made after returning to music in the 1990s reflect your passage through personal loss. Trampin' is more about being involved in the world. Was that a conscious choice?

The records reflect where I am. I have no choice when I make them. Gone Again [1996] was an homage to Fred ["Sonic" Smith, the MC5 guitarist and Patti's husband, who died in 1994]. My father was dying all through Gung Ho [2000]. My mother passed away before we made this record. But it does not mourn my mother. It possesses her energy. She loved rock & roll. She loved "Rock n Roll Nigger" and "Gloria." She loved the kids, and she answered my fan mail, right to the end of her life.

This is an American record. The American plains are in it. The mother figure is strong. Because I oppose the Bush administration, people think I am anti-American. I love American history. I love the language of our organic law and the spacious skies. True patriotism is not blindly following whoever is president. There are troubling issues in our country. But it is worth fighting for, worth tearing apart so we can rebuild it. All of those things are on this record.

How democratic is your band? It has your name on it, and you write the words.

Obviously, it's not a true democracy [smiles]. But the one thing that keeps us democratic is I don't write much music. The music is written by the band, and I choose the music that I can enter. The guys will be playing something, and I leap in. Like "Radio Baghdad" -- Oliver wrote the theme. And the first time I heard the guys working on it, the whole vision came to me. I wanted it to be from the mouth of a young boy in Baghdad who starts his own radio station with parts from the dumps, the war junkyards. I even did research on how a boy would make a radio.

But the night we recorded it, a different voice came out: a female voice. I imagined myself as a mother on the night of shock and awe, trying to sing my child to sleep, not knowing if our whole city was going to be destroyed. "Radio Baghdad" is like the jagged terrain of my mind. These are the things I think about, that I have studied and learned, that make me feel angry and worried.

Do you still believe rock & roll has the power to change hearts and minds -- the way you did in the 1970s?

Rock & roll is like painting. Can great paintings still be done? It depends on who holds the brush. I don't sit around saying rock & roll used to be great and now it sucks. I didn't say it then. In 1974 we felt like there was no reason for it to suck: "We can incite people, we can do this ourselves." Rock & roll is a grass-roots art. It belongs to the people, and we can choose whether it sucks or not, just as we can choose who is going to be in the White House.

We actively, or non-actively, create what is around us. People talk to me about the election in 2000: "Aren't you sorry that you worked for Ralph Nader?" I'm not sorry at all. I say to those people, "What did you do for your candidate? Did you fight for Al Gore?" I would not presume to influence how people vote at all. I just want them to register and vote.

Will you campaign for Nader this year?

I support Nader as a human being, always. What I say to people, and I said it in the last election: I am not soliciting you to vote for Nader. I am soliciting you to listen to him. This is a great man, an honest man. He has served the people all his life, and he will give you tools, questions on how to conduct yourself, how to expect your candidate to conduct himself. We have a way of marginalizing our greatest men. People are afraid they're going to spoil everything.

In "Gandhi," you repeatedly sing, "Awake from your slumber/Get 'em with the numbers." Do you think the numbers are there, enough to start a new American revolution?

I don't know if I sense change as much as an openness to change. Something is going to happen; something's gotta give. A lot of young people want to talk to me about the Sixties or CBGB. I always tell them that the most interesting times are the ones we live in. No one should resist doing work because they think it's all been done. When I was a kid, I heard it: "All the great novels and poems have been written." After 1972, it was "All the great rock stars are dead." I don't subscribe to that. I like what T.S. Eliot said: "Each generation has to translate for itself." Everybody's got to reclaim these things -- poetry, rock & roll, political activism -- and it has to be done over and over. It's like eating. You can't say, "Oh, I ate yesterday." You have to eat again.

Bob Dylan has been a central figure in your life, as an inspiration and, in 1995, a touring partner. Now you are signed to his lifelong label, Columbia. What do you think of his recent work?

My favorite recent album was World Gone Wrong [1993, a record of traditional covers], for his interpretations of those beautiful, heartbroken songs and his great guitar playing. But I have the same philosophy about Bob that I had when I was younger: Bob has given us so much. He has to have the space to evolve as he sees fit. I was there in White Plains [New York] in 1966 when people booed him, when he came out in the plaid suit and did the electric set. I thought this was great, something new. I was appalled to be among people that were booing him. Right there, I decided I would never judge anything he did, any more than you would judge Picasso. People who want Picasso to stick to his blue period have little vision themselves.

How much contemporary pop do you listen to? Have you ever heard a Britney Spears record?

I've heard her on the radio, but she doesn't speak to me. I listen to singing voices. That Christina Aguilera song, "Beautiful" -- that has some fine singing. But I'm not the person they're targeting. Nor am I the person that's seduced.

Do you think of women like Spears and Aguilera -- the pop divas -- as competition?

It sounds conceited, but I consider myself an artist. I have been living as an artist and writer since I was very young. My self-image is not dependent on record sales. I've never made money from records. I owe Arista money -- they still send me bills. I've never had a gold record. I did rock & roll because I had certain ideas and beliefs. It wasn't my motivation to get rich and famous off of rock & roll.

I've had some really low financial periods -- in fact, the Eighties [laughs]. But I have ways that I make money. People will use a song of mine in a movie. I do book projects, people buy my art, my photographs. I do all right. But things have to be fair. I wouldn't want, before the new record came out, for someone to get a hold of it [on the Internet] -- that it was free. I'm old-fashioned. I like going and buying a record. I don't even know how to download.

At the age of fifty-seven, you have a new album and record deal. You continue to tour. Do you ever stop and wonder how much longer you can -- or want -- to be in rock & roll?

I will do my work where I can best contribute. In 1979, when I was thirty or so, I felt I had no more to contribute. So I didn't, and that was the right decision. Now, when I pick up my electric guitar and plug in, I don't feel any different than I did some decades ago. Rock & roll belongs to the young. But for some reason, I am continuously recruited to contribute [laughs].

The music keeps telling you to come back.

Something like that. Bob Dylan is a man of few words, and we didn't talk a lot when I toured with him. But he did counsel me -- beseech me in a friendly way -- to come back and do my work, sing for the people [smiles]. It was worthy counsel.