These are golden days for singer-songwriter folk, rock, and pop fans during its most fertile period. Many of the era’s major artists have formally released big box sets of original material during 2024, including many previously unissued b-sides, live cuts, pictures, documents, and demos from the past. For example, Neil Young released the third volume of his Archives (1976-1987), a considerable compilation of 17 CDs and five Blu-Ray discs.
Joni Mitchell released the fourth volume of her multi-disc anthology Archives and the remastered five-CD set of official discs from the period, The Asylum Albums (1976-1980). Bob Dylan made public the enormous 27-disc deluxe box set The 1974 Live Recordings, a 431-track collection of the artist’s arena performances with the Band. That’s just the mighty tip of the enormous musical iceberg! Because of commercial considerations, boomers hear and see stuff they couldn’t legitimately do before.
That brings us to the 19-CD limited-edition deluxe box set, Laura Nyro, Hear My Story: The Collection 1966-1995. Unlike Young, Mitchell, and Dylan, Laura Nyro is more of a cult figure than a superstar, even though she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. During her most successful period, Nyro was better known as a songwriter of hits for other acts than for her performances.
Many avid music listeners from the period would not recognize her name or voice, only the hits recorded by other artists, including The Fifth Dimension (“Stoned Soul Picnic”, “Wedding Bell Blues”, “Sweet Blindness”), Blood Sweat & Tears (“And When I Die”), Three Dog Night (“Eli’s Coming”), and Barbara Streisand (“Stoney End”). Nyro was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.
The irony is that Nyro had a great voice with a wide vocal range and a distinctive style. She could sing soft, sweet, and low on one song, bluesy and loud on the next. Some of the singer’s best performances feature her covering other people’s material rather than her own, such as her full-length 1971 collaboration Gonna Take a Miracle with the girl group trio LaBelle (Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash ).
Nyro and LaBelle successfully take Motown classics and street corner symphonies such as “You Really Got a Hold on Me”, “Jimmy Mack”, “I Met Him on a Sunday”, and Spanish Harlem” back to their doo-wop roots. Nyro does more than hold her own singing with these strong voiced colleagues, she leads them to the musical promised land with the help of Philadelphia super producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.
The reasons for the performer’s relative obscurity are complex. Many of her industry peers suggested in print that Laura Nyro was her own worst enemy regarding self-promotion. (Note: I once interviewed Todd Rundgren, who had worked with her in the past and had nothing but the highest praise for her musicianship, but he also implied she could be difficult.) The pop hits recorded by other artists obscure the singer’s work in various styles, making her music hard to get a bead on. She was equally at home with folk, jazz, cabaret, rock, pop, country, and rhythm & blues—often meshing the different genres together in the same song.
Nyro frequently began singing in one style and then ventured off on odd tangents and interludes. She rejected the two verses and a chorus template found in the popular music of the time for her own idiosyncratic impulses. The artists having hits with Nyro’s songs often smoothed out Nyro’s eccentricities. This made her songs available for others who came from various musical backgrounds to put their stamp on the songs while the composer’s version was sui generis.
Consider songs such as “And When I Die”, which was a hit for the folkies Peter, Paul & Mary and jazz rockers Blood, Sweat & Tears, or “Stoney End”, a top-ten hit for Broadway belter Barbara Streisand and successfully covered by country act Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys (not to mention later recorded by acts as varied as Diana Ross and the Chicks). Nyro’s songs sound equally comfortable, no matter what approach one takes.
This collection reveals that Laura Nyro’s renditions are usually the best because she takes risks. Her voice is unique but not cutesy or quirky. The lesser-known songs often stand out best, no matter when she originally wrote or recorded them. Nyro could be a topical writer. She was an activist, feminist, and environmentalist whose beliefs informed her material engagingly. But it’s her artistry that makes her music endure, whether she sings about poverty, motherhood, or ecology.
While one can track her music in terms of cultural touchstones to gain an understanding of the times, this reduces her work to artifacts when they are so much more. I suggest loading the entire anthology onto one’s music player and setting it on shuffle mode to appreciate the work better. That said, it is first necessary to hear the CDs to appreciate the musician’s growth and development. That is not because Nyro improved over time, although one could argue that she became more sophisticated.
Hear My Story contains Nyro’s ten original studio albums: More Than a New Discovery (1967), Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968), New York Tendaberry (1969), Christmas and the Beads of Sweat (1970), Gonna Take a Miracle (1971), Smile (1976), Nested (1978), Mother’s Spiritual (1984), Walk the Dog & Light the Light (1993) and her posthumously released Angel in the Dark (2001).
It also includes her live LPs: Spread Your Wings and Fly: Live at the Fillmore East (1971), Season of Lights… Laura Nyro in Concert (1977), Live / The Loom’s Desire (1993 & 1994), and two previously unreleased concert recordings from San Francisco (1994), as well as the artist’s demo tape, Go Find the Moon (1966), and a collection of rarities.
All the items have been remastered and housed in individual sleeves with original artwork. They are held in a deluxe, lift-off lid box with a hardback coffee-table book that contains in-depth notes by British journalist Vivien Goldman, a foreword from Elton John, and written endorsements from a host of peers including John Sebastian, Jackson Browne, Clive Davis, Lou Adler, Randy Brecker, and Bernard Purdie It is a massive product worthy of its weight because of Nyro’s substantial talent.
Fans and critics highly regard her early albums because of their originality and expressiveness. The title of her debut record, More Than a New Discovery, suggests the record company’s high expectations for her work. The LP contains several songs that became future hits, such as “And When I Die” and “Stoney End”. The other songs, like “I Never Meant to Hurt You” and “Lazy Susan”, are equally as good in the artist’s capable hands.
The box presents the album in both mono and stereo versions. Laura Nyro harmonizes with everything from a playful harmonica or a whispery flute to a blaring saxophone or pounding drums as if she’s just another instrument in the band, taking solos as needed for emphasis. She creatively stretches notes, modifies the tempos, and raises or lowers the pitch as needed. Consider her version of “Wedding Bell Blues” with the vocal group the Fifth Dimension, and one realizes she is singing all the lead vocal parts by herself.
The following three records are the most highly regarded works from Nyro’s oeuvre. Tracks such as “Poverty Train” and “Lonely Women” from Eli and the Thirteenth Confession have become underground classics. The immediacy of her delivery on cuts like“Save the Country” and “Love and Time” from New York Tendaberry have made them contemporary standards. She employs players like Duane Allman, Chuck Rainey, and Cornell Dupree on the lustrous Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, a loose concept album that connects everything from the Carole King / Gerry Goffin ode to the city “Up on the Roof” with the imaginary travelogue “When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag”.
Nyro’s poetic lyrics on all three albums allow her to use her voice to explore a wide range of creative topics with “love” at the center. Whether it’s romantic desire for another person or the desi, the general feeling for other living beings on the planet in general.
Laura Nyro was less productive during the next two decades. After a five-year pause, she released Smile and Nested in the late 1970s. These records showcased a less intense persona. Cuts such as “I am the Blues”, “The Cat-Song”, “Mr. Blue (The Song of Communications)”, and “American Dreamer” reveal she was just as creative as before but much more reflective. She quotes lines of actual dialogue, curse words, similes about love like broken dishes, and the forthcoming birth of her child in confessional lyrics that suggest a quotidian reality has infected her creativity. The world had changed from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, and so had Nyro, who had become more personal.
This evolution continues over her last three albums. Mother’s Spiritual has her cynically re-engaged with the world from a feminist perspective after over a dozen years of recording hiatus with songs like “The Right to Vote” and “Mother’s Spiritual” during the ominous year 1984 when Ronald Reagan was re-elected.
Almost ten years later, she put out one more album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light, that combined her personal and political concerns in ways that seemed reminiscent of her more youthful and vibrant writings and a strong feminist ideology on songs like “A Woman of the World” and “Louise’s Church”.
Nyro recorded the material from Angel in the Dark in 1995, but it wasn’t released until the 21st century. There are a lot of covers, including slow-paced versions of chestnuts like George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You”, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By”, and Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart’s “He Was Too Good to Me” reveal that she was still in good voice. Nyro died of ovarian cancer in 1997 at 49 years of age.
The five live CDs show Nyro’s charismatic ability to connect with her audience. She comes off as alternatively shy and bold as the music frees her to act spontaneously. The live versions of the songs hold up well. The collected rarities are just icing on the cake for the completist. There are no great revelations or disappointments here. After 18 CDs, one has a strong sense of the artist and her work.
Those unacquainted with Laura Nyro may be surprised at how familiar she sounds. That’s because she has influenced so many contemporary musicians, including Alicia Keys, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega, Jenny Lewis, St. Vincent, and Joanna Newsom, not to mention her peers such as Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Bette Midler. That’s just the women. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Elton John, Neil Young, and Elvis Costello are also in her debt. This anthology is her story.