Laura Nyro
Hear My Song: The Collection, 1966-1995
MADFISH
In a year where the diversity, drive, and invention of women in pop is currently celebrated through Billboard charts, best-of lists, special issues, and dedicated social media pages, few of these artists have been as special, dedicated, and innovative as Laura Nyro was in her day. This isn’t meant to pit one woman against another, or act toward contrasting artists’ accomplishments. This isn’t even an attempt to state that the wide breadth of Nyro’s work—as literate, soulful, and introspective a writer and vocalist as she was a pianist whose melodies were rich with elements of jazz, folk, R&B, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley showtunes—solely inspired women, as more than a few singer-songwriting men have benefitted from her influence.
The urbane pop songs and cosmopolitan sonic stylings of Nyro affected those with whom she collaborated (Labelle) and for whom she penned music (Barbra Streisand). No song from Fiona Apple, SZA, Tori Amos, or Norah Jones after her—or those of her contemporaries: Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler, Phoebe Snow—lacks Nyro in its DNA. Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything, Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky, most of Steely Dan’s records, and Elton John’s opulent output throughout the 1970s owe Nyro debts of gratitude, the latter of whom fesses up and gives credit where credit’s due in Hear My Song’s large coffee table book.
And it does take an entire coffee table to hold the weight of 19 Nyro CDs containing 10 remastered studio albums, 6 live albums (including two previously unreleased gigs), an unheard 1966 demo tape, and one additional disc of rare tracks. Nyro’s sound was that of NYC pre-gentrification—the neighborly doo wop of the Bronx in the late 1950s, the wisened coffeehouse folk of the early ’60s, of growing up Russian, Jewish, Polish, and Italian—and of her mom’s mix of scratchy records from Nina Simone, Judy Garland, and Leontyne Price. When Nyro commenced to write songs, she quickly charted hits such as “Eli’s Comin’,” “Stoned Soul Picnic,” and “And When I Die,” while additionally making the likes of Three Dog Night, The 5th Dimension, and Blood, Sweat & Tears bigger stars than they already were.
But it’s her own open-throat, plaintive vocal and lyrical displays of melancholic intimacy—the poetry of the bittersweet and the Beat romantic, the thrilling chill of sweat cooling off on the skin after a long, slow evening of sex, then conversation—that made her second album, 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, and its 1969 follow-up, New York Tendaberry, epic. She could turn love sexy and silly with “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Beads of Sweat,” or send emotion off into a tornado of obsession with “Sweet Blindness,” complete with a quirky Count Basie riff at its close. Contrarily, however, most Nyro songs such as “Lonely Women,” “The Confession,” and the dark entirety of Tendaberry are softly melancholic and melodramatic. With such disconsolation at her fingertips, who better to make the holidays not so merry or bright on the seven-minute “Christmas in My Soul”?
As far as passionate soul goes, Nyro was put on her best, most vibrant, sultry display, along with her newfound friends in Labelle (Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash acting as her harmoniously gossamer, literal Greek chorus) and Sound of Philadelphia–founding producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff for 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle and cover selections as delicate as “The Bells,” as playful as “I Met Him on a Sunday,” and as sweet as “Spanish Harlem.” The ideal of the all-cover album doesn’t get better than this.
Though she took a five-year-break from recording and touring to get married and divorced, Nyro’s later albums show no break in her routine of bracing, challengingly romantic songcraft with 1976’s Smile and its experimental exploration of Chinese culture through traditional Asian instrumentation; with 1978’s Nested and its homey maternal material and laid-back groove; with 1984’s Mother's Spiritual and its becalmed, melodic reach into environmentalism and politics; and, finally, with 1993’s Walk the Dog & Light the Light with its patchouli-scented embrace of womanhood, flightier jazz arrangements, and lofty production elements from Steely Dan’s knob-twiddler Gary Katz in something of a full-circle moment. Angel in the Dark, the posthumously released 2001 album of material recorded in 1994 and 1995, is never a throwaway; instead, its noirish contempo originals and its wealth of cooing covers from Thom Bell, Smokey Robinson, and Burt Bacharach (the rarely produced “Be Aware”) sounded like a logical next step in Nyro’s advancement as a singer and writer.
For all of the heartrending moodiness and passionate compliance of her studio albums, in performance Nyro is an entertainer through and through, peppering her concerts with hearty takes on old-school party hits and paeans to broken romance, along with expanding her then-newest material into chamber jazz-soul suites such as “Mother Earth” and “I Am the Blues.” With the box set’s release of her early audition tapes and its full album of rarities, you can hear Nyro’s progression—an X-ray of how she further implicated the influence of her musical heroes within her own work, such as marrying early takes on “And When I Die,” “Luckie,” and “Lazy Susan” with a medley of fragmented cover favorites like “When Sunny Gets Blue,” “Kansas City,” and “I Only Want to Be with You.” Or how “Let It Be Me” and “The Christmas Song” existed as one. Or how the soulfully romantic street-operatic doo wop of her childhood in the Bronx lasted a lifetime, whether it was covering Carole King’s yearning “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” or through Nyro’s own sweet, longing demos of “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Emmie,” and “Coffee Morning.”
Nineteen discs of constant craving told through the sounds of contagiously complex music and deeply emotive vocals may seem like a haul. I promise you, though, once you start pouring through all of Laura Nyro’s work, you’ll want more.
