Patti Smith records are as much about proto-rap poetic ritual as verse-chorus rocking. Her first set of new music since Just Kids – the 2010 memoir that found her dancing barefoot into the literary mainstream – has some sweet moments of song. But the real magic happens when words start flying off the grooves. "We'll break all the rules," she sings on "April Fool," a beckoning single that breaks none but boasts exquisite guitar by Smith's old pal Tom Verlaine. He also illuminates "Nine," a gleaming folk-rocker that imagines the sort of extended collaboration that might've been had the two not taken separate roads. Bowing to the Russian filmmaker who also inspired Geoff Dyer's recent tour-de-force Zona, "Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)" spaces out in Sun Ra soul-jazz territory, while "Seneca" is a mourning waltz that floats on accordion and fiddle. The incantatory peak is "Constantine's Dream," an extended anthem to art-making which replaces the snubbed Jesus of her signature "Gloria" with a snubbed St. Francis and makes the painter Piero della Francesca sound like an awesomely rock'n'roll dude. On a lovely coda of Neil Young's "After The Gold Rush" featuring her kids Jesse and Jackson, Smith instructs "look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century." She's a mother who still ain't runnin' from nothin'.

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• Photos: Random Notes

“Let My Love Open the Door”

A peppy, hopeful love song, "Let My Love Open the Door" became a U. S. Top Ten hit for Pete Townshend in 1980, anchored by the kind of repeating synthesizer figures that he'd used in some of the Who's recordings in the previous decade. Although Townshend brushed the song off as "just a ditty" in Rolling Stone shortly after its release, in 1996 he revealed it was about love of the holiest sort. "It's supposed to be about the power of God's love," he remarked. "That when you're in difficulty, whether it's major or minor, God's love is always there for you."