In 1977,\u00a0Patti Smith<\/a>\u00a0pressed play for the first time on the tape\u00a0Bruce Springsteen<\/a>\u00a0had scrawled \u201cBecause the Night\u201d across. Instantly, she knew the song had transformative powers. She just didn’t realize the full extent of them for decades.<\/p>\n Jimmy Iovine, future Apple Music titan and demonstrated hitmaker, was then an ambitious engineer helming his first album as producer with Smith\u2019s third LP,\u00a0Easter<\/em>. He shepherded the star-crossed collaboration, which paired Springsteen\u2019s music and chorus with verses penned by Smith. She feverishly wrote while listening to the demo on a loop as she waited for a long-distance call from the boyfriend who would become her husband and the father to her children, Fred Sonic Smith, the guitarist of Detroit\u2019s rabble-rousing MC5. Set to Springsteen\u2019s building piano arpeggios and rising to an enigmatic chorus, her verses immediately bring us into Smith\u2019s room as she paces, waiting:\u00a0Love is a ring, the telephone.\u00a0<\/em>She finished by the time he rang around midnight, the first sign that this song was different — that this love was different, too.<\/p>\n She and Iovine recorded the track immediately, and \u201cBecause the Night\u201d served as\u00a0Easter<\/em>\u2019s first single and Smith\u2019s first hit, with reverberations resonating 40 years after its peak at No. 13 on the Hot 100 (on the June 24, 1978 chart). Smith and Springsteen seldom perform the song together, but it\u2019s a regular highlight on both their setlists. They do stride onto the same stage from time to time, sometimes hand-in-hand as they did after an April 2018 performance in New York City. (When U2 performed it at the 25th anniversary concert for the Rock n\u2019 Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, Bono invited them both to join the band, and referred to the tune as \u201cthe song we wish we\u2019d written.\u201d)<\/p>\n Numerous covers — including a 2013 collaboration from Garbage and Screaming Females, and a 10,000 Maniacs live version from their 1993\u00a0MTV Unplugged\u00a0<\/em>set, which peaked at No. 11 on the Hot 100 — speak to the pop potency of \u201cBecause the Night.\u201d But for Smith, its staying power is rooted in its ability to evolve. Their children were young when Fred died of heart failure in 1994, but now they\u2019re grown, with son Jackson playing guitar and daughter Jesse playing piano in her band. Together with the rest of the Patti Smith Group, they perform \u201cBecause the Night\u201d as a layered tribute for Fred and Patti\u2019s love, as well as the family and art that came from it.<\/p>\n Below, Smith, Iovine and Lenny Kaye, her guitarist and longtime collaborator, reflect on \u201cBecause the Night\u201d and the path it forged over the last 40 years. Shirley Manson of Garbage, Screaming Females\u2019 Marissa Paternoster and Bono also spoke on their connections to \u201cBecause the Night,\u201d all showing how many lives are tied up in a single love song that began with one long night spent waiting for the phone to ring.\u00a0(Their answers, from individual interviews, have been lightly edited for clarity and length.)<\/em><\/p>\n