"Horses" also features two adaptations of songs by other artists: "Gloria", a radical re-imagining of the Them song incorporating verses from Smith's own poem "Oath", and "Land", already a live favorite, which features the first verse of Chris Kenner's "Land of a Thousand Dances". On "Land", Smith weaves the imagery of the Kenner song into an elaborate narrative about a character named Johnny—an allusion to the similarly-named homoerotic protagonist of William S. Burroughs' 1971 novel "The Wild Boys"—while additionally referencing Arthur Rimbaud and, less directly, Jimi Hendrix, whom Smith imagined to be the song's protagonist, "dreaming a simple rock-and-roll song, and it takes him into all these other realms." The characterization of Johnny in "Land" was also inspired by Smith's close friend Robert Mapplethorpe, who had immersed himself in the New York S&M scene; in her memoir "Just Kids" (2012), Smith refers to Mapplethorpe and Burroughs, sitting together in CBGB, as "Johnny and the horse".