In 1979, Patti Smith semi-retired from her music career as she found love in the face of Fred 'Sonic' Smith, ex-MC5 guitarist and leader of Detroit's "Sonic Rendezvous Band". They got married on 1 March 1980 and moved from NYC to a Detroit suburb, where they led a quiet, private life raising their two kids, son Jackson and daughter Jesse.
Meanwhile, the couple started working on a new album together: first it was 1980 with only five songs completed; two years later those songs were scrapped and new recordings were made and then the project was halted until 1987, the year of rehearsing and recording the final album in NYC's Hit Factory recording studio.
In June 1988, Patti Smith's first record in some 9 years was released, titled 'Dream Of Life'. It was the first fruit of her artistic collaboration with her husband, and a celebration of the love Patti and Fred shared for each other, their children and music.
"Fred crafted that whole album. He wrote all the music. A lot of the concept of the songs were his," Patti noted in an interview (Addicted To Noise, issue #2, 06 June 1996).
"I look at 'Dream Of Life' as [Fred's] gift to me... I told him we should call it by both of our names but he wouldn't," she related in another interview (Mojo, issue #33, Aug 1996).
'Dream Of Life' was preceded by the anthemic call-to-arms "People Have The Power" as the leading single.
It was followed by the catchy pop number "Looking For You (I Was)" as the second one. Produced by Fred Smith & Jimmy Iovine, it was written around 1986 on the floor of the Mayflower Hotel in NYC. It continued a hidden theme in Patti Smith's records: a nod to the '60s girl-group sound that sneaks up at the end of this tune. Patti talked about the vocal treatments on it: "Those harmonies - the first time I heard them I said 'Oh no, turn them off!' They seemed funny, but I got to like them. When I was younger, I loved the Ronettes and Darlene Love, but those things are usually pretty accidental and harmonies certainly aren't my forte. That's another case where Fred might say 'Try this,' and something that isn't really conscious will happen."
In the performance video that was shot to accompany the single, Patti Smith is shown holding symbolic objects like an arrow, a DNA scale model, a burning candle, various glass spheres and notably a b/w photo of a flower by photographer and Patti’s life-time friend Robert Mapplethorpe.
Patti reminisced about hers and Fred's hopes for the song [as a single]: "It was our pop song, it was gonna be played on the radio coast-to-coast and be really giant in Detroit (laughter)… That was our plan".
In an effort to bring that plan to fruition, a promo CD was issued to promote the commercial release of the 7" single in the USA. The CD featured two alternate edits of the album track, namely the Pop Edit and the Rock Edit, both remixed by Scott Litt at A&M Studio in Hollywood, CA. Unfairly enough the single went rather unnoticed and didn’t enter the US charts.
