It didn’t take long for lockdown to be reframed as the chance to finally produce that creative masterpiece you’ve been sitting on: after all, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague, so what’s your excuse? Patti Smith – as ever – did something more interesting with her time, focusing not on one singular work but an opportunity to let her wild creativity roam while she shielded with a bronchial condition.
In April 2021, Smith launched a Substack newsletter to share her poetry, music and thoughts. It quickly inspired The Melting, a longer, serialised work (now at 45 parts and counting) that started as her private pandemic journal before undergoing a glorious multimedia mutation that blurs fact and fiction. “I was already looking to get out of my skin and move into another dimension,” she told Esquire.
