s musician, writer, and record producer, Kaye was intimately involved with an array of artists and bands. He was a guitarist for poet/rocker Patti Smith since her band's inception in 1974, and co-authored Waylon, The Life Story of Waylon Jennings. He worked in the studio with such artists asR.E.M., James, Suzanne Vega, Jim Carroll, Soul Asylum, Kristin Hersh, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as his own solo muse. His seminal anthology of sixties' garage-rock, Nuggets, is widely regarded as defining the genre.You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon, an impressionistic study of the romantic singers of the 1930s, was published by Villard/Random House in 2004.

From the outset, Curtis's aim has been to mix rock and pop sensibilities.  It is Curtis's raison d'etre, forged from a position as a music consumer turned composer.