Laura Nyro: like no other
[NOTE: Yesterday in the comments to the Everly Brothers post, the name of Laura Nyro was brought up by commenter “Brio.” That reminded me that I had posted – at least, I thought I had posted – a piece on Nyro. Turns out I hadn’t; it was only a draft. So I thought this might be a good time to get it out of mothballs.]
I thought everyone knew Laura Nyro’s work. Apparently not. And most of those who do know it probably know it only in cover versions by other artists.
But to me, Nyro herself was famous. In college we all listened to her record “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession” incessantly. It was one of the few records I owned, so I didn’t even have to rely on roommates. And even now, when I hadn’t listened (till this post) for around forty years, I know every note.
But what I remember best is the absolute shock we all felt on first hearing Nyro. She was something completely different, at least in pop music; a riveting blend of many genres of music (certainly blues was heavily in there) with a twist of something inimitably her own. And she remains somewhat shocking to hear, especially in the context of the times and considering her youth, although some who came after her followed in some of her footsteps into a more free-wheeling form, a highly emotional pastiche of vocals and piano playing.
But Laura was the first and foremost, sui generis, bold, seemingly unafraid. She wrote the music and the lyrics, she played the piano, and she sang in a voice that could do just about anything.
Here she is in a rare live performance, although she’s not playing the piano here. The first song she sings is the somewhat more conventional “Wedding Bell Blues.” She cuts loose on the second. Nyro was 19 years old:
It’s widely known that The Who and The Jimi Hendrix Experience made their first major US appearances at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and that Janis Joplin, too, made her big debut on that stage, but when 19-year-old Laura Nyro…performed an 18-minute-long set after The Byrds and before the Jefferson Airplane. The story is told over and over again of how she walked off the stage and collapsed in tears, sure that the audience hated her and was booing as she sang. Mama Michelle Phillips got her stoned and drove her around for a while to calm her down. However when documentary film director D.A. Pennebaker found the footage of this performance many years later, this “legend” (which was perpetuated by Nyro herself and was contained in her New York Times obituary) was debunked. The only audible thing being shouted after Nyro performs is “Beautiful!” and there is no booing heard at all.
And here’s one of my favorites from the album that made her famous – or about as famous as she ever became:
Here you can see her accompanying herself on the piano, starting at 4:47. And here is Fil analyzing her vocal performance in that same clip.
Laura only lived to be 49, dying of the ovarian cancer that had killed her mother at the same age.
Elton John had this to say about her:
She was the first person, songwriting-wise, where there were no rules. There were tempo changes. There wasn’t a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight. She didn’t write in that kinda way. And that put in my mind that you didn’t have to work in that old template that everybody else did. She just carried on in her own kind of weird way and the melodies were just fantastic. She influenced more songwriters that came out – and successful songwriters – than probably any other songwriter who came before her….
This is music so far ahead of its time that still sounds so unbelievable. The soul, the passion, just the out and out audacity of the way her rhythmic and melody changes come was like nothing I’d ever heard before.
Or since, Elton. Or since.
“we all listened to her record Eli and the Thirteenth Confession”
Yes. I was a pimply guy, not really interested in “chick” music. But I owned this record and played the tracks off it. I could feel its power although it was not written for me.
Thanks Neo. I was under the mistaken impression that Three Dog Night wrote “Eli’s Comin”. Her music was definitely far ahead of its time.
Yes. As I responded to Brio:
Laura Nyro is a lost treasure.
I knew her first from those who covered her: 5th Dimension “Stoned Soul Picnic”, “Wedding Bell Blues”; Blood, Sweat and Tears, “And When I Die.” I was astounded to learn later that she recorded “And When I Die” when she was 17!
But I didn’t hear “Eli and the 13th Confession” until a roommate played it for me in the early 70s. She wrote it in the magic year of 1967, when magic was happening everywhere, and Nyro made her magic too. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a concept album, but it sure felt like it for being a whole.
Two of the songs I hear as LSD trips — “Poverty Train” and “Timer” — though that’s not necessary for hearing them, indelibly, as Laura Nyro songs.
“Eli” was a huge album for me and still is. Her fluid combination of rock, pop, soul and blues I’ve never heard better in one package. Way ahead of her time and still not equaled.
She was also such a New Yorker. Could anyone from anywhere else have done what she did?
My impression is she is remembered by musicians, not so much by the public. (Even Joni Mitchell paid her respects.) That’s a shame.
I’m not sure how I came to watch this television program (probably a rerun), but when Laura Nyro launched into ‘Save The Country’ I fell in love.
https://youtu.be/bNXCojJmLps
7th Heaven in Kansas City was THE album store back in the day. I purchased a used album copy of ‘New York Tendaberry’ just for that song, yet when the desperate moan of ‘Gibsom Street’ pounded forth, followed by the piano romp ‘Captain Saint Lucifer,’ Laura wasn’t simply a vice, she was a habit for me. Pretty weird for a 13 y.o. boy back in the day. Thanks for the memories.
Then there was Kate Bush…
I recognize her name but never directly familiarized myself with her work. I am very familiar with the popular covers of her work and generally liked her songs when I heard them performed by others. Watching the video’s her eclectic talent is obvious and undeniable. Yet and forgive me for this but I find her performances a bit offputting. At least from my sensibilities, she sings a bit too fast and is a ‘bit too’ hyper-frenetic for my taste. If she only relaxed just a bit, I think I’d be a much bigger fan.
In the late 60’s or early 70’s (I don’t recall) I first heard “Eli and the thirteenth confession”. I could not stop listening to it. The songs were classics, yes. But her vocals were incredible. I tried singing along with her just to increase my range trying to follow her. Impossible. She was among the 5 or so most underrated, under-appreciated (by the public) musicians of our lifetime. A truly unique artist. Your post made me go back and listen to a few other tunes from her that I used to love. Her range, her vitality in singing was so infectious. She gave so much to each song. I miss that kind of quality. That kind of actual talent- not studio propped up ‘talent’.
I saw her perform solo live about 1978 when she was 8, yes, 8 months pregnant. She played piano and sang her heart out. My favorite album, though, was the cover album, “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle.”
I recognized songs but not her name. So thank you for that.
But Geoffrey – too frenetic? This is what I’d call frenetic! Jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara and tap-dancer Kazunori Kumagai. Hiromi is always frenetic in performance, and I love it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8LjLFxg3G0
I didn’t care especially for those covers that were radio hits, and consequently didn’t hear Nyro herself till I got involved with a girl who loved New York Tendaberry. We would get stoned and listen to it and it was very intense. But the romance ended and I never listened much to Laura Nyro after that. I should give her a listen again. She was certainly a very striking talent.
I recently purchased Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro. She remains an absolute favorite. I still miss her. Got to see her perform. She was real guarded and shy in person. Her exuberance and/or pathos in early collaboration with Patti LaBelle And The Bluebells always get me. She was very beautiful. A muse to Todd Rundgren and David Geffen. The doo-wop hints early on and her word choices for writing ~ so endearing. Like I said I still really miss her.
My favorite album, though, was the cover album, “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle.”
Crystal A Turner:
You’re not wrong. That’s a gorgeous soul album. Who’s going to say Nyro didn’t pay her dues to sing with Patti LaBelle’s group?
Looking up the album on wiki, I see she formed a deep connection with LaBelle. Cultural appropriation scolds, take note.
I love that the album led with the Shirelle’s “I Met Him on Sunday.” Just voices and handclaps until the climax.
Clearly Nyro’s voice and music are the main course, but you’re missing something if you think she’s only bopping on about love and lovers. The words are their reward too.
Take “Stoned Soul Picnic”…
________________________
Can you surry?
Can you pic-nic,
C’mon, c’mon surry down
To a stoned soul picnic.
________________________
Where did she get surry? It’s so perfect, I was half-convinced it was black slang somewhere. But it’s not. She’s a poet. She just made it up and made it work.
Then she heads off into Dylan Thomas territory:
________________________
There’ll be lots of time and wine
Red yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine
Red yellow honey
Sassafras and moonshine (moonshine)
Stoned soul, stoned soul
…
Rain and sun come in akin
And from the sky come the Lord and the lightning
And from the sky come
The Lord and the lightning
Stoned soul, stoned soul
…
There’ll be trains of blossoms (there’ll be trains of blossoms)
There’ll be trains of music (there’ll be music)
There’ll be trains of trust, trains of golden dust
Come along and surry on sweet…
________________________
What a talent!
I’ve been listening to Eli’s Comin’ for 50 years and portions of it still make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
2012 Rock N Roll Hall of Fame Induction Laura Nyro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9sYxjBQ8tw
Remarks by Bette Midler; remarks by Laura’s son; terrific cover of Stoney End by Sara Bareilles.
How lovely to be in the virtual company of so many Laura Nyro lovers. She was and is something.
At a very scaled down Christmas lunch my young niece said “I would love to live in a hedonistic decade.” And I thought to myself: “The hedonism is easy, the difficulty is to produce the art.” Both Jimi Hendrix and Laura Nyro. And both just kids at the time, really.
8.30am on Sunday morning in London, and now I’m going to listen to Spanish Harlem.
“Stoned Soul Picnic” is one of the few “radio songs” I remember from those days.
Never really understood the lyrics, but I loved the melody of the refrain “Red yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine” – who else ever used the word “sassafras” in a pop song?
Scrooge here.
Completely not impressed.
Talked to a professional musician–everything, voice, wind, piano, directing–about why I like baroque. Simple and structured. Apparently it’s not simple, or if you think it is, it’s you that’s simple, but it is structured and Aubrey requires structure.
Completely let all that music pass me by. The only connection is that you couldn’t get away from some of them–somebody was always playing them, if only the radio station your roommate had on-and they are necessarily associated with the circumstances and some of the circumstances still…have impact.
I recall people trying to sell the “magic” of the era. I suppose that, between the music and the weed….
I was surprised how many guys in the Army were re-reading LOTR, so I guess there was that.
Crap. Got no more reason to be a downer this morning than last.
Thank you for reminding me…..In college we all listened to her record Eli and the Thirteenth Confession too. Loved her and her music…..
I used to listen to Laura Nyro when I was in college in the late 60s. She wrote and sang so many tremendous songs. Very tragic that she died young.
I saw Laura Nyro live, maybe even with Labelle (my memory’s unclear), always liked her, have continued to listen to her into the present.
Meanwhile, something you might like from someone in the now:
https://youtu.be/EPKkjUpwwGY
Re: Structure, psychedelics, baroque…
Richard Aubrey:
It’s not one or the other. I loved baroque as well as the Beatles then, and still do. Many great albums came out in 1967 and most were marked by psychedelics. That’s just what happened.
Including “Eli.” For instance, the lyrics from “Poverty Train”:
_____________________________________________
It looks good and dirty on shiny light strip
And if you don’t get beat you got yourself a trip
You can see the walls roar, see your brains on the floor
Become God, become cripple, become funky and split
Why was I born
____________________________________________
Yes, it’s about being poor in the city, but from a psychedelic perspective. At the end the narrator takes cocaine for relief, but cocaine didn’t cause the earlier hallucinations so typical of LSD.
Then, there’s “Timer,” a song about the narrator’s bad breakup, but again from a psychedelic perspective, of the breakup happening in time and being part of her soul’s journey. She travels back to the innocence of being a baby, when “life was a pleasure ground.”
_________________________________________
Oh I belong to Timer
He changed my face
You’re a fine one Timer
You’ve got me walkin’
Through the gates of space
I keep rememberin’
Indoors that I used to walk through
Baby I’m not tryin’ to talk you down
But I could walk through them doors
Onto a pleasure ground
It was sweet and funny
A pleasure ground
Didn’t know about money
Didn’t know about Timer
Did not know about Timer
_________________________________________
In the final verse Nyro reveals the identity of Timer. “You’re a jigsaw Timer/
God is a jigsaw.” God will heal her and she will love again.
Nyro didn’t compartmentalize her songs. She didn’t decide to write a psychedelic song like “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds,” studded with hallucinatory imagery and sounds, and stop there. No, she wrote about life and her life at the time included psychedelic experiences.
I can’t think of anyone else who did that except Leonard Cohen (who took more than his share of acid BTW).
huxley.
I appreciate the attention.
I could listen to “mille regretz” from Josquin Deprez all day, covered by Paula bar Giese. Youtube. And all kinds of that sort of thing including multiple covers. Renaissane motets.
Going on fifty years ago, talking to a mechanic about a friend who was heavily into weed, he said he didn’t start because he might like it and then he’d never know who was coming up behind him.
I always wanted to know because there was always somebody who’d appointed me to do that. Couldn’t afford the “magic”, pharmacological or otherwise. Neither could the mechanic, for whatever reason.
Still, although chin deep–is that deep enough–in the era, born 1945, enlisted early 1969, college up to the latter date, I never got it and never wanted to.
I liked non-preachy folk music.
Richard Aubrey:
OK. You don’t like psychedelics, you have your reasons, and you seem to look down on those who do. So?
I would say that a worthwhile life includes many experiences in which one becomes so absorbed that one might “never know who was coming up [from] behind.” For instance, making art or making love or even listening, really listening, to Bach.
Limiting one’s life so that one might never be surprised from behind sounds pretty dismal to me.
Never heard her. Never heard of her. Don’t care if the rest of you waste your ears on such “pop”. I’m not into drug-generated and meaning-obscure lyrics regardless of how good the voice(s) are.
Try Handel’s “Messiah” in this season.
Listen to Beethoven’s 9th symphony, or Dvorak’s 5th. Or Schumann’s Cello Concerto.
Called Classical for a reason!
So what is the “Thirteenth Confession” in the album title? It’s the 13th song, “The Confession,” which begins:
_________________________________________
Super summer sugar coppin’
In the mornin’
Do your shoppin’ baby
_________________________________________
Any hopes that one might be reading LSD into Nyro’s lyrics by mistake die here. “Sugar copping” makes no sense unless it’s a reference to scoring acid back in the old-fashioned days when it was often sold on sugar cubes.
And “Super summer” is the so-called “Summer of Love” in 1967, when Nyro wrote “Eli.”
Then the lyrics get radical. As best I can make out, it’s about a peak experience while making love on LSD in frank sexual terms:
_________________________________________
Would you love to love me baby?
I would love to love you baby now
…
Love my lovething
Super ride inside my lovething
_________________________________________
The narrator is tripping hard. Her lover keeps disappearing, then reappearing. She’s hearing voices and having insights:
_________________________________________
I keep hearin’ mother cryin’
I keep hearin’ daddy through his grave
“Little girl, of all the daughters
You were born a woman
Not a slave”
_________________________________________
She feels conflicted about her lover, then breaks through and is reborn:
_________________________________________
Oh I hate my winsome lover
Tell him I’ve had others
At my breast
But tell him he held my heart
And only now am I a virgin
I confess
Love my lovething
Love is surely gospel
_________________________________________
Wow! That’s a trip.
huxley. Easy for you to say. I haven’t been appointed to keep you and yours safe, literally or metaphorically. Whoever is wouldn’t be allowed the luxury of self absorbed. Not in the contract.
When I helped my wife chaperone field trips to Mexico or Spain, the kids’ parents didn’t put any stock in my knowledge of cathedral architecture. While waiting for the departure, one mom came up to me and said she was glad “sarge” was going to be watching her daughter. Same thing from other chaperones.
As I say, who’s coming up behind me, metaphorically speaking, isn’t important to me. It’s important to…the folks at church who have me working security. And walking down the street, I can’t afford to be too self-absorbed.
I twigged to this in the late sixties, doing the civil rights thing in Mississippi. Politically, I wasn’t down with the struggle but I was expected to be prepared to keep watching. Eventually got a Gainesburger for my troubles. At the reunion…meh.
Not feeling sorry for myself. Got to be good for something and a lot of people haven’t figured theirs out yet. So I’m okay with the role. But the “magic”…. No sale.
Lately into Clamavi de Profundis doing Tolkien’s poetry from LOTR. Check them out on youtube.
Richard Aubrey:
“No sale” … don’t buy. Nobody is forcing you.
This is a topic about Laura Nyro’s music, mostly for those who like her and her music.
If you don’t like her music, and what it seems to represent to you, you don’t.
I don’t get what your lectures and your sense of responsibility have to do with Nyro and this discussion.
Had to do with the music and by extension the times. The “magic”. There’s lots of music not to like. Hers didn’t grab me the first couple of times I heard it back then.
I have a relation whose Pandora settings bring an endless series of songs with, as far as I can tell, no melody, hardly any rhythm, can’t hardly make out the lyrics…. Wonder how those will be recalled fifty years hence.
No biggy. Point is the times and the magic as if they were all-encompassing. That’s what I was referring to.
I discovered Laura Nyro’s “More than a New Discovery” in a cutout rack in a campus bookstore in 1968, and continue to be amazed. She colored outside the lines.
Human brains are not fully developed until age 23-25.
It completely eludes me that the wisdom of adolescents, expressed in their lyrics and “songs”, are the subject of so much worship. It is also worthy of note that so many of these glitterati are drug addicts who often overdose.
Yes the singing ability may be great, but like all tools, it depends on what use that tool is put.
Cicero:
I don’t believe Laura Nyro considered herself in the business of imparting wisdom.
Nyro told her stories with as much beauty and power as she could bring to bear and that is how she will be judged. For many in her audience she succeeded with high marks. That is why we are still talking about her.
Nyro did not write her songs to validate your idea of wisdom. If that’s your complaint, noted, but how about moving on?
Other than telling us to listen to your favorite classical music, do you have anything to say specifically about Laura Nyro?
Scott Johnson at Powerline.com recently wrote about Laura. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/sunday-morning-coming-down-107.php
Huxley
Cicero didn’t say Nyro deliberately wrote as some kind of prophetess. It’s that she and others are considered such today. Wonder what they’d think now about that.
I was thinking about singer/songwriters who might have been influenced by Laura Nyro and came up with two of my already faves: Rickie Lee Jones and Sophie B. Hawkins.
Then I checked the web. I wasn’t surprised to discover Jones and Hawkins had long been enchanted by Nyro.
___________________________________
Rickie Lee Jones:
When I heard Laura Nyro, she had these tones and chords, and the idea of this New York — this mystical urban place, where life is teeming and it’s all fail or win, at any moment. She was so unlike anything that I had ever heard. And I think it really inspired me in a great way.
–Rickie Lee Jones
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1643112
___________________________________
Sophie B. Hawkins:
The reason [Hawkins] went with [Sony/]Columbia was because of… Laura Nyro.
“Laura Nyro is a huge influence on me,” says Hawkins. “She’s someone I dearly and desperately loved and wish I could have met. Rick Chertoff, who co-produced Tongues and Tails, and some of the musicians on the record, like Rob Hyman, loved Laura Nyro, too, and that was a huge bond in signing with Sony[/Columbia].
-Sophie B. Hawkins – “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”
https://www.songfacts.com/blog/playingmysong/sophie-b-hawkins-damn-i-wish-i-was-your-lover
-Sophie B. Hawkins, “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” (Official Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6r-k9Bk6o
Cicero didn’t say Nyro deliberately wrote as some kind of prophetess. It’s that she and others are considered such today. Wonder what they’d think now about that.
Richard Aubrey:
Cicero wields a plenty broad brush in all directions, which included Nyro and her fans such as myself.
No sale.
She was a phenomenal and beautiful talent. Not a prophet and not everybody’s cuppa. Losing her 25 years ago still saddens me. I miss Lou Reed David Bowie Leonard Cohen a lot but not as poignantly as Laura Nyro. The naysayers here are outnumbered, ha! Comparing her dismissively to one’s more favorite is too subjective on a page dedicated to her legacy. Also, psychedelic? I wouldn’t categorize her lyrics particularly about drug experience influences. We had Traffic, Blind Faith, Jimi Hendrix etc as an entire genre. I found her writing super inspired. As far as magic times; they were for me in spades! Just good good talent ability and writing.
Hands off the man, flim flam man
He’s the one in the Trojan horse making out like he’s Santa Claus
Oh lord, the man’s a fraud, he’s a flim flam man. He’s a fox, he’s a flim flam man
This Aubrey dude has got a fever-wracked troll’s insidious intent to ruin other people’s enjoyment . Give this guy a coupl’a anti-depressants with a few whiskeys and he’ll be just fine.
Whole lot of navel gazing going on. Sad that cancer took her at 49 as it took her mother. Life nonetheless goes on. Her music? Ask someone else in 100 years.
I practically get teary-eyed thinking of being with my friends singing “Blood Upon The Risers”. We thought it was funny. Still do.
Some nineteen year old, in the throes of unrequited puppy love and who has foregone the use of the shot glass for his rum and coke might write something that looks as if a cardiologist helped. And since he’s not the only one, others might be shaken by it. Even years later.
McKuen, in “Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows”–just the title for a bad weekend romance wise–almost hit the ignition point. I can see where people with a certain type of life experience might fall into the book.
But nothing’s going to hit everybody where it hurts. Or brings joy.
om:
Are you suggesting that people not discuss anyone or anything in the arts unless they know it will still be famous in 100 years? That would pretty much halt all discussion of anyone or anything other than the classics that were created over 100 years ago.
Cicero; et al.:
I certainly never took any rock lyrics, or lives of rock musicians, as some sort of guide to life. Au contraire. I realized that a lot of them led destructive lives, or at least liked to write “out there” lyrics whether they themselves lived that way or not. None of that precluded my liking their music, and in some cases still liking it. Nor are my likings for rock music or pop music or folk music mutually exclusive. And none of that means I don’t also like classical music – I like it very much. I don’t see the problem here with liking it all.
Of course, some adolescents do emulate the lifestyle, but I don’t know what percentage that is.
As for Nyro’s lyrics, in the song “Poverty Train” that’s seen in the Monterey Festival excerpt, the lyrics seem to me to convey a bad drug trip. There were other songs and other artists who were much more into advocating drugs. By the way, here’s a description of Nyro’s attitude towards drugs:
Neo. I suspect that a lot of folks who got past that stage, or through it, depending, look back with some kind of…not fondness…but some nostalgia for a time when every day was an adventure–defined by one’s circumstances, and the danger is now gone.
There is some footage of a Brothers Four concert on youtube. At, iirc, UCLA. The faces in the crowd shots strike me as being very happy to be away from “adventures” for the moment. I think it was in 1966.
Christmas and the Beads of Sweat still
my favorite
Sharing admiration for a talented artist is not navel gazing one iota. Grief for the loss of an artist at 49 (like her mother) these 25 years later is not an aimless aside. (IMHO Rod McKuen does not remain noteworthy even a little). Postulating the lack of merit of an artist you don’t care for on a page that’s celebrating her contribution doesn’t diminish the joy of her admirers even a little. She contained raucous uplifting meditative inventive soul. Her gracious contribution endures.
Rock and pop music: infatuations of young adults and many who may not accept that they were not as wise then as they claim to be now. Whatever floats your boat I guess.
Those who don’t like hippies and psychedelics are welcome to not like hippies and psychedelics. I disagree, but so what?
Laura Nyro was of that time and place and her “Eli” album likewise. I regard it as Nyro’s “Sgt. Pepper” — a profound compliment in my book. I’ve made my case for “Eli’s” psychedelic aspects and no one has argued.
Like “Sgt. Pepper” “Eli” is also a breakthrough album and songwriters since, as Elton John said in neo’s quote, have been enjoying that freedom.
The world doesn’t revolve around pop music, granted, but if you care about such music and you care about Laura Nyro … hip, hip, hooray!
neo:
I believed the Monterey booing story. I have read since, as you say, it was not so.
But why did Nyro believe it? Did she hear “Beautiful!” and hear “Boo!”? Was she too sensitive and far from home? Was she a paranoid artist?
It seems a shame. She never quite got back on the horse, so to speak, and I hoped to hear much more from her.
AesopFan,
Who ever used the word sassafras in a pop tune? Here is a ridiculous song that I liked as a pre-teen around the time of Neo’s Nyro songs, called “Hot Smoke and Sassafras.”
It’s a drug song alright, but I never got the drug reference until much later and I learned that that bark of the sassafras tree is used to extract safrole oil which is used a a precursor to the drugs MDA and MDMA. I’d guess in the 60’s they’d just smoke the oil.
Hot Smoke and Sassafras by Bubble Puppy
A lil ole guitar band from Texas; and these guys can’t sing for sh_t.
_______
I completely missed Laura Nyro in the day, though I’d heard the name. Newmanian noticed like I did that she had a technically terrific voice and tremendous range. She’s a mid alto, but she went down to those extremely low notes effortlessly and with great tonality, which is rare. I assumed she was using a falsetto for the high notes on Wedding Bell Blues, but listening to the other songs it might just be that her range is that large.
huxley:
My sense, from reading about Nyro, is that she had a very difficult childhood (details unspecified) and grew up a loner who immersed herself in music. She started singing publicly not as a solo artist but as a group of street singers harmonizing. I think her artistry and love of music pushed her forward to solo but she had a residue of fear about performing that may have never gone away. Thus, the mishearing of “Beautiful” as boos.
“bark of the sassafras tree is used to extract safrole oil which is used a a precursor to the drugs MDA and MDMA. I’d guess in the 60’s they’d just smoke the oil.”- TommyJay
And I guess that just goes to show people will get high on anything!
We only knew sassafras as a food product, and for its early use in root beer.
Maybe that’s why people liked the alcohol-substitute-drink without knowing why, and similarly with the original Coca-Cola (I have always been kind of surprised they even kept the first part of that name, but it was already the Brand Label when they took the cocaine out).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassafras#Human_uses
“Sassafras albidum is an important ingredient in some distinct foods of the United States. It is the main ingredient in traditional root beer and sassafras root tea, and ground leaves of sassafras are a distinctive additive in Louisiana Creole cuisine. (See the article on filé powder, and a common thickening and flavoring agent in gumbo.) — Sassafras is no longer used in commercially produced root beer since sassafras oil was banned for use in commercially mass-produced foods and drugs by the FDA in 1960 due to health concerns about the carcinogenicity of safrole, a major constituent of sassafras oil, in animal studies.”
The drug use comes later in the article.
I suspect our ancestors didn’t worry too much about dying young from cancer because they were dying young from so many other, more obvious, causes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola
“Pemberton called for five ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup (approximately 37 g/L), a significant dose; in 1891, Candler claimed his formula (altered extensively from Pemberton’s original) contained only a tenth of this amount. Coca-Cola once contained an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass. (For comparison, a typical dose or “line” of cocaine is 50–75 mg.[72]) In 1903, it was removed.[73]
After 1904, instead of using fresh leaves, Coca-Cola started using “spent” leaves – the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with trace levels of cocaine.[74] Since then, Coca-Cola has used a cocaine-free coca leaf extract. Today, that extract is prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey, the only manufacturing plant authorized by the federal government to import and process coca leaves, which it obtains from Peru and Bolivia.[75] Stepan Company extracts cocaine from the coca leaves, which it then sells to Mallinckrodt, the only company in the United States licensed to purify cocaine for medicinal use.[76]”
More fun trivia: Woke people can no longer be allowed to imbibe.
(The basics are in the Wiki article, but this one is more interesting)
https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-pemberton
“The birth of Coca-Cola begins in the late 19th century with a man named Dr. John Stith Pemberton, a slave owner who worked in medicine and fought as a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War.
Before John Pemberton served in the Third Georgia Cavalry Battalion, he made his living as a chemist and a pharmacist. Having studied at the Reform Medical College in Macon, Georgia, Pemberton was a licensed practitioner of Thomsonian medicine, which relies on the principles of botany and herbalism to rid the body of harmful toxins.”
A bit ironic, given later developments.
His very serious sword wound from battle was treated with opium (as was common at the time), and that led to an addiction which he treated with cocaine (yeah, they really did that).
“By mixing coca leaves, wine, and kola nuts (in case that cocaine didn’t offer a big enough caffeine kick), Pemberton came up with his first beverage, called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. The drink, advertised as an anti-depressant, a painkiller, and an all-around aphrodisiac, worked to relieve the ails of Pemberton’s opioid addiction and was sold to the public, where it gained almost immediate success.”
And the rest, as they say, is history.
End of today’s tangential mini-seminar.
AesopFan:
More about Sassafras (probable carcinogen). I couldn’t easily post the link from my smart phone. It’s carcinogenic properties have been public knowledge for more than 60 years IIRC.
https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/sassafras
“Patient Warnings
Sassafras is classified as a carcinogenic substance. It caused liver cancer in laboratory animals. The risk of developing cancer increases with the amount consumed and duration of consumption.”
But hey, people still want to use it even today. More ’60s logic? Now Roundup, and GMOs those are entirely different kettles of facts.
I was listening to a clip of “Stoned Soul Picnic” and came across this comment, which ties back to another music post of Neo’s.
“Laura did not write songs. She wrote little three-minute vocal symphonies that also had the advantage of containing one bulletproof pop hook after the other. She’s was in a class of her own in the 1960s.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CfSgsvqJE
AesopFan:
Lauro Nyro was up there IMO with musicians like Lennon-McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. She assimilated a huge amount of music at a young age and came up with her own synthesis, which influenced others but was essentially uncopyable.
You can hear the places she came from, but there was no one behind her and no one who came after her. Much like neo said above.
Getting back to “Eli” as a radical album, I wonder how many people noticed that the song “Emmie” is about a lesbian relationship.
________________________________________
Touch me, oh wake me, Emily
You ornament the Earth for me
Emily, you’re the natural snow,
The unstudied sea, you’re a cameo
And I swear you were born a weaver’s lover,
Born for the loom’s desire.
…
You’re my friend and I loved you,
Emily, Emily, Emily, Emily.
She got the way to move me, Emmie.
She got the way to move me, yeah.
________________________________________
Eventually it became public knowledge that Nyro was bisexual. However, this is the first lesbian song I can think of by someone with hits on AM radio and Nyro wrote it in 1967, way ahead of David Bowie or Lou Reed or glitter rock.
There was a one-hit wonder song, “Sally Go ‘Round the Roses” in 1963, but it was left to the listener to decide whether the Roses were women or what. Not a personal love letter.
–The Jaynetts, “Sally, Go ‘Round The Roses”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZyclycB6eo
Interesting choreography in the video. Men and women dancing in business attire.
Too much LSD? It’s almost at 11. 🙂
om:
Care to say something intelligent or even pertinent about Laura Nyro? I get the impression you’re in over your head here.
Nyro was a remarkable artist and someone who was, like it or not, very much a sixties person, which her music reflected in her Nyroesque way. She didn’t need to pack in a lot of “marmalade skies” and mellotrons to talk about psychedelic experiences in her songs.
“Eli” was one of the first albums I really listened to after I got serious about poetry. (I didn’t just make up the stuff I wrote today.) I was reading much modern poetry, which is hard, and thought I’d take a crack at rock lyrics as sort of poetry with training wheels. I was amazed at how much was going on in songs written by the greats, particularly Nyro’s “Eli.” I recommend the exercise.
“Ok, Boomer.”
I’m a boomer so don’t bother explaining the 60’s to me. A lot of awful stuff happened back then; not all hippies droppin acid and livin the age of free love.
Your worship of Laura Nyro is getting cult like.
I have a neighbor who is a retired English prof. Writes poetry and occasionally self-publishes.
I asked him if–somebody had mentioned this–it were true that, while the poet puts stuff INTO a poem, what the reader is personally means he gets different stuff OUT of the poem. May be entirely unrelated.
He agreed.
That put me in mind of an item I’d read by a retired soldier. After a lengthy joint exercise with a Brit unit, they had a dining-in–on the enlisted side. The senior Brit non com gave the senior US noncom in the Battalion a heavily bound volume of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. It was to be battalion property.
It was received in the spirit in which it was given. Kipling gets soldiers and soldiers get Kipling.
I can think of no other group for whom the book would have been considered an apt gift. Nor who would have gotten out of it what Kipling put into it, but something else including confusion.
To get back to Nyro, you have to be in the ethos to get out of her work what she put into it. If not…you don’t get much out of it and what you do might not be what she thought she was putting into it.
She had a fantastic voice. I wish I could have heard her in a different field.
Richard Aubrey:
The whole business of what writers put into words and what readers take out is fraught in both directions. Not simple at all.
When it comes to songs, it’s complicated by the fact that most listeners only catch a few lines here and there, mostly the chorus. That being the case most listeners don’t get much textual meaning out of a song, even if they share the ethos of the songwriter.
And that’s OK. No one must listen to song lyrics. The music carries more of the weight.
Most neo commenters are older and to some extent share Nyro’s 1967 ethos. However, I would bet that most of them are caught by surprise by the close examination of her song lyrics I’ve presented.
I was surprised myself. I didn’t expect to find three songs with strong LSD components and one about a lesbian relationship on “Eli.”
No one must closely examine song lyrics either, but I do and I find it interesting. I thought that those who like Nyro might too.
Most Boomers did acid and loved it (sure?), it’s the ethos and the pathos. More navel gazin. There’s a pony down there too. Sheesh.
om:
What in the world is your point? Who said anything like that?
As to navel gazing, we are discussing a talented musician, who smoked pot and took acid and wrote about those experiences — among many others — in her music. No one, including Nyro, is advocating drugs, but they were part of her life and she wrote about them.
What is your problem with that? Do you have anything to say that doesn’t come down to snark? Sheesh, indeed.
“Most neo commenters are older and to some extent share Nyro’s 1967 ethos.” Projection maybe, from your viewpoint to “most?”
“No one, including Nyro, is advocating drugs, ….” Not even you? That doesn’t seem consistent in you comments about drugs in this thread and in others.
You are trying too hard to be profound about Laura Nyro IMO. Happy New year anyway! 😉
om:
Most boomers did not do acid.
I don’t know how old you are, or from where you get your impressions. However, I spent the 60s in places that where hotbeds of hippiedom, and although certainly there was acid, it was used by nowhere near half. My own estimate would be somewhere between 10% and 15%, and indeed when you look at surveys for lifetime use of hallucinogens of any kind, you get a figure of about 15% for boomers.
huxley:
I knew the words to all of Nyro’s songs. I tend to know a lot of lyrics unless they are literally unintelligible (which sometimes is the case).
It’s my impression that I’m not especially unusual among music lovers, although I have no idea how common it actually is to know lyrics. For me (and I believe we’ve had this discussion before), the lyrics were not a guide to life, nor did I emulate the artists as people in any way. I liked the music, and sometimes I liked the lyrics and still do – especially if they moved me or spoke to me in some special way.
I saw performers as performers, and lyrics as part of the performance. Of course, some performers had lives that spiraled down because of drugs, but I never saw why that would be a reason to try to emulate them. I do think that some people did try to emulate them, and that lyrical advocacy of drugs did have some effect. But it certainly wasn’t anywhere near universal even among those who liked the music, as I did. The drug advocacy was also fairly ubiquitous (even the Beatles ultimately got into the act, whereas in the beginning they just wanted to hold your hand).
Neo-
Your music posts are always about “popular” music.
When you post about ballet, you are always about the dancer(s), never the music to which they spin and twirl. It is never about Tchaikovsky and The Nutcracker, Copland, Bernstein, or Ravel, just about the ballerina and the physical aspects of the dance, to which the music is incidental. Without the music there would be nothing!
I’ve got to put (sarc) tags in comments when it isn’t obvious.
But those that did acid, ….. (sarc), that was never my monkey nor my circus.
Today we have meth, oxycontyn, and all the other new pharmacological paths to destruction; heroin chic anyone, passe’? There are probably singers and artists making a killing today sharing their struggles with drugs. Too grim.
It’s not quite understandable to me how a period and subculture which produced such great music could produce such disastrous “thought”.
I knew the words to all of Nyro’s songs. I tend to know a lot of lyrics unless they are literally unintelligible (which sometimes is the case).
neo: So what did you make of the songs I mentioned? How did you interpret them?
“No one, including Nyro, is advocating drugs, ….” Not even you? That doesn’t seem consistent in you comments about drugs in this thread and in others.
om: No, I am not advocating drugs. Just because I like sushi doesn’t mean that I think everybody should eat sushi.
Is that a distinction you can grasp? Your comments generally strike me as poorly thought out, sarcastic and not much of a contribution.
For the record I advocate caution when it comes to drugs. It takes me about six months to get through an ounce of weed. Aside from wine, that’s it. I steer clear of pills and powders entirely except for painkillers after surgery. I’ve still got a lot of painkillers leftover that I keep just in case.
You assume too much about me.
As a boomer who did acid, I’d say 15% sounds pretty reasonable.
Bill M: “It’s not quite understandable to me how a period and subculture which produced such great music could produce such disastrous “thought”.”
Let that be a lesson to you: in general, artists are not great thinkers or even especially good ones. Some relative few are, but the genius of the artist as artist is in the skill of making, not in intellectual achievement. I would have saved myself some confusion when I was young if I’d realized that sooner.
This is especially striking in the case of performing artists, as the entertainment industry constantly demonstrates. I’m not aware of anything ever said by a Beatle or a Rolling Stone that was not either dull or commonplace, and frequently both. Novelists and poets are more likely to be substantial thinkers as well as makers, because words are their material and there’s an expectation that their work will have at least some intellectual substance. Songwriters, being part poet, have some of that as well. But the ’60s made it possible to write songs that are widely successful even if the lyrics are pretty close to nonsense.
Performing artists may even be less likely than the average person to think clearly, as the effectiveness of their work depends on their ability to give it emotional depth and intensity. It’s pretty obvious when you listen to the political pronouncements of many of them that they are emoting and posturing just as they do on stage and screen, seeing themselves as embattled heroes standing up to the bad guys. I have a left-wing friend who’s an amateur actor and frequently demonstrates this.
Of course people for whom ideas and thinking are their occupation are not necessarily good thinkers, either, these days.
It’s not quite understandable to me how a period and subculture which produced such great music could produce such disastrous “thought”.
Bill+M: As the lives of artists tell us, there is not much of relationship between great art and great advice on life. Sixties musicians did not invent that.
However, I don’t find it surprising that psychedelics, which seem to be the particular concern here, contributed to rock music in the sixties. Great art often emerges with new cultural developments and new technology. Such developments open new opportunities for artists to create and by god, they will.
Psychedelics were such a development. So was the electric guitar.
huxley:
I already addressed that in my comment to you on this thread at 2:49. Part of it went like this:
In Nyro’s case, I saw it as her writing about drugs both because it was trendy (lots of lyrics by lots of performers were about drugs) and because like a fiction writer she was taking that as a topic for a song. I was quite aware that drugs might or might not have been something in her own life, but why would I care about that one way or the other? I was enjoying her music, not looking to her as a guru. I never did the latter with musicians, and have trouble understanding why anyone would, although I know that some people do.
The “Poverty Train” lyrics – as I also have pointed out in a previous comment on this thread – are quite anti-drug, by the way.
I was surrounded by many people doing drugs in school, and song lyrics were the least of my worries regarding them. I liked Nyro’s music and still do.
Oh the deep mystery of huxley, sometimes so much profundity it too much to take, seriously.
Cicero:
You know, this blog has something very handy: its own search engine. That means you can actually see what I’ve written before you declare that I’ve not written about it. You really should try it before you make statements like that.
Just to take a couple of quick examples, a search for “Chopin” yields this. One for “Tchaikovksy” yields several, but this is probably the one that focuses on him most. Janacek here (although I see that in the blog transfer the HTML code got messed up, and the video disappeared). Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations here.
There are plenty more.
neo:
Yes, you’ve explained that “the lyrics were not a guide to life, nor did I emulate the artists as people in any way” before. I didn’t ask you about that.
I was asking for your particular interpretations of those songs. You don’t seem willing to share those beyond your awareness that drugs might be involved, which isn’t really an answer, but fine.
It wasn’t just the drugs. I find Nyro’s sexual lyrics worth remarking upon too. “Super ride inside my lovething” is graphic beyond any other pop lyric I can remember from 1967 or before.
Likewise “Emmie,” Nyro’s story about a lesbian relationship which as far as I can tell was the pop breakthrough for that subject. I assume it wasn’t just a fictional topic that Nyro decided to treat. I’m pretty sure that was personal — as well as what I consider her songs which involved LSD trips.
I disagree that “Poverty Train” reduces to an anti-drug song.
Maybe no one but you cares about her sex life in song? Inconceivable.
My point is not that Laura Nyro was writing drug songs like “White Rabbit” or “Journey to the Center of Your Mind.” She was not arm-in-arm with Tim Leary leading the charge into the psychedelic revolution, as John Lennon sometimes was.
I’m saying drug experiences played an important part in some of her songs on “Eli”, which, so far as I can tell, has gone largely unrecognized except for those blatant lines in “Poverty Train” about “seeing your brains on the floor” etc.
I find that interesting. To the extent one wishes to understand Nyro’s art in “Eli” it’s an aspect worth considering.
T-Rex recommended a Powerline link on Laura Nyro in one of Scott Johnson’s wonderful “Sunday Morning Coming Down” posts about popular music. Johnson sings Nyro’s praises for “Eli,” mentions the first few songs then boom, he’s outta there.
It’s not an easy album to confront in its entirety, particularly for conservatives it seems. I’m not surprised.
Keep diggin’, that pony is down there. Those benighted, enervated conservatives, so sad they are. (sarc)
huxley:
I think my answers to you were already quite clear, and so I don’t know how much more clear I can possibly be, but I’ll try: her lyrics to me were like a story, and they had no particular resonance or meaning in my life and so I didn’t much care about them. The music and her voice were what I liked, although I appreciated the poetic nature of the lyrics.
Some lyrics speak to me much more – for example, a lot of Leonard Cohen’s, especially his work after the 60s. Nyro’s did not.
Nor did my comments reduce “Poverty Train” to being an anti-drug song. It is many things, and the drug commentary is merely a part of that, the part we happened to have been discussing. What I wrote was that the lyrics are “quite anti-drug.” That comment is further fleshed out here. The link I gave in that comment gets into it in even more detail.
I don’t remember being shocked by Nyro’s lyrics, although I recognized they were more “out there” than most. I didn’t see her as a pop artist and wasn’t comparing her lyrics to pop lyrics or even rock lyrics.
Also, as far as a song like “Emmie” goes, I saw the lyrics (as I saw ALL her lyrics, actually) as a form of poetry. Poets write about all sorts of things. Whether or not Nyro was in fact a lesbian did not concern me one way or the other. Ferreting out the truth of a lyric as it relates to the person’s life versus the poetry or “pretend” of a lyric wasn’t why I listened to songs nor is it why I listen to them now, although if I’m very interested in the artist I do like to learn about his or her life. There was no internet then, and it never occurred to me to wonder or care about Nyro’s sex life or to research it at the time.
Obviously she was breaking lots of barriers in her lyrics, but actually if someone had asked me at the time I probably would have likened her most to the “beat” poets of the 50s. I might mention that although I had read some of their work, it just didn’t interest me either and I didn’t like it, although I recognized it as influential culturally, at least to a certain extent.
…her lyrics to me were like a story, and they had no particular resonance or meaning in my life and so I didn’t much care about them. The music and her voice were what I liked, although I appreciated the poetic nature of the lyrics.
neo:
Well, I get that her music and voice carried the album for you. Nothing wrong with that.
But it seems that the lyrics were just a confection of words which went along with the voice and music, that you could take or leave, as it did, or did not, have resonance in your life.
I find that unsatisfying. IMO songwriters of the confessional sort, as I consider Nyro, are usually saying something which comes out of their lives and is important to them, and is worth pondering.
But I get it. You don’t care about that and I do.
Huxley
I’m 75 and need parts you don’t get at Auto Zone.
Still, I would much rather help you move your furniture for an afternoon than ten minutes hearing about a dysfunctional family.
Joan Baez and Barbara Streisand had stunning voices. But I didn’t find them pleasant as I did, say, Judy Collins’. And I think Nyro. But, then, I’d want to like the song.
Richard+Aubrey:
There’s plenty of Laura Nyro to like, even love, without dysfunctional whatevers.
Stephen Sondheim said “Stoned Soul Picnic” “summed up what music is all about.” He wanted to work with Nyro. Not too shabby!
Leave off the “stoned” and the song is just about people getting together and loving it and each other.
Take care, old-timer. I’m right behind you.
neo:
I’m going to double-down on “Poverty Train” and say it is not an anti-drug song. It’s an anti-poverty song.
________________________________________
You can see the walls roar, see your brains on the floor
Become God, become cripple, become funky and split
________________________________________
That’s standard LSD trip stuff and not entirely negative. What’s wrong with becoming God or “funky and split”? Note the way Nyro vocally caresses “funky and split.”
The narrator’s problem is being stuck in a ghetto hellhole. Drugs — LSD or cocaine — won’t solve her problem, but they aren’t the problem at least in the context of the song. As the narrator twice cries, “Why was I born” into such a place?
Of course, if one just picks and chooses the lyrics which resonate, as you say you do with Nyro, sure, it’s an anti-drug song.
I am going on the song itself, not whatever Charles Calello had to say that Laura said in your quote above. Your link doesn’t work, but here it is:
https://www.songfacts.com/facts/laura-nyro/poverty-train
If Nyro was really talking about heroin, that’s quite a ways different from LSD and muddles the song. When celebrities publicly go on about how they triumphed over drugs, I take it with a large grain of salt.
I find the Songfacts claims unclear and dubious.
huxley:
Of course it’s an anti-poverty song. Duuuuhhhh.
It is also an anti-drug song – as opposed to a song saying drugs are great. I suppose “see your brains on the floor” may not be negative to you, but for most people it doesn’t sound like fun and games.
Also: “Devil played with my brother, devil drove my mother
Now all the tears in the gutter are floodin’ the sea.”
Many possible “devils,” but drugs are certainly a good candidate.
In addition: “Baby it feels like I’m dyin
Now I swear there’s something better than
Gettin’ off on sweet cocaine.” Got to find the “something better” rather than surrender to the thing that’s destroying you while it gives you a temporary high.
You’re not going to change my mind and apparently I’m not going to change yours. But I’m well aware of the lyrics to the song.
I recall with some embarrassment being a know-it-all punk in my teens. Not as bad as some.
But even I was repelled by the theme in Dylan’s “The Times, they are a’changin'”
Some seemed to think only they and Bob knew it and it was up to the two of them to let the rest of us know.
Some seemed to think a bunch of us mid-adolescents along with Bob were the only ones clued in and we needed to warn all those oblivious Ozzie and Harriets out there who figured nothing had and nothing was going to change.
The song, imo, characterized part of the ethos, self-righteous preachiness (see Tom Lehrer on the subject) to those who would know more than anybody about changes.
The Greatest Generation didn’t know from changing? The social impact of WW II casualties in today’s population would be as if a million young men were dead in under four years and huge numbers more were crippled. After the Depression we still call “The Great”.
Nyro didn’t preach. Good for her. But that was part of the ethos some remember fondly. And the drugs. And the music. I guess it was the self-righteous, smug ignorance which so many thought allowed them to require things of others.
Wait, now. When was that again?
huxley:
People who write song lyrics are not necessarily being specific in the medical sense. As I’ve already indicated, I see Nyro’s lyrics as poetic; also impressionistic and free-form. And as I’ve also indicated in my comment at 8:58, the specific drug she mentions in that particular song is cocaine – although that doesn’t mean it’s the only drug she was thinking about when she wrote the lyrics, or the only drug implied in them.
And she nowhere is “going on about how” she “triumphed over drugs.” What’s that got to do with our discussion? I certainly wasn’t suggesting she was doing that.
By the way, when I say the song is rather anti-drug, I do not mean in the proselytizing preaching didactic sense. I mean it generally paints a negative picture, and suggests (“there must be something better”) that drugs are a dead-end and temporary solution.
Speaking of Laura Nyro, I’ve been meaning to post this note about a Nyro song over at Instapundit’s open thread post. But for some reason I haven’t. (I need to make notes to myself or need to start taking Ginkgo biloba for memory issues.)
I’ve heard that Trump had been using the song, YMCA, during his campaign. Now that we are in a different phase, something made me think of Laura Nyro’s song, Save The Country, as sort of an anthem for him and his supporters.
It has never been a favorite of mine but her raw emotion on this version speaks to me about the direction the country is heading. It captures the need and frustration to do something even if most of us do not know how or what to do.
https://youtu.be/bNXCojJmLps
I will post a duplicate of this at Instapundit tomorrow.
EDIT: I didn’t see that Neo had posted the same clip in the thread. I didn’t play Neo’s clips because I’ve heard every Nyro clip on YouTube already.
After my posting, I began to wonder if my post was melodramatic—might be, but so what. A lot of her music speaks to me lyrically in addition to the music and voice. That is the sort of music I always seek.
Scanning this thread it seems it turned quickly into a meta-discussion over why you like or don’t like Nyro rather than Nyro herself. I was not a particularly big fan of hers but the fact that her songs were covered by mainstream pop groups (3 Dog Night, Fifth Dimension) is an indication she had some songwriting talent.
I did not weigh in on the “hook” thread but I believe that songwriting is the most critical/rare talent in pop music, more so than playing an instrument or even singing so there is something to be said for Nyro.
After decades of seeing her name associated with several classic songs from that period, I finally did a deep dive into Nyro’s catalog a few months ago — Spotify will change your life if you let it — and with all that buildup I was half-expecting a letdown, where her versions were weaker and lacking in some key way.
Holy smokes was I wrong, and happy about it. I was blown away by how great and original she was, a real one-of-a-kind, generational talent. Still sounds fresh and original 50+ years later. There haven’t been that many artists who invent new ways of writing music that sound like nobody else, but she’s one of those.