Enigmatic and highly reclusive, Laura Nyro’s reputation often preceded her work. Hers is a name often thrown around at the mention of 1960s soul-pop, but the breadth of her catalogue confirms an admirable range that extends far beyond her mythic status. Nyro was New York’s true earth mother diva, a 1960s urchin soul who earned her stripes as a teen singing in subways and street corners for the experience and joy of it.
Like many female songwriters, she built up a store of influences that took shape under her prodigious direction. There are modern markers of her work today; Fiona Apple and Alison Moyet are prime examples of artists who have sourced from Laura Nyro’s blues, with artists like Sweden’s Rebecka Törnqvist mining the slicker, jazzier margins of her work.
Yet, despite her impact on the following generations, Laura Nyro remains somewhat of a cache artist, known often by name but not always by sound. The Bronx native, in fact, showed an impressive hand in her experiments, plumbing the soul and pop of forebearers like the Supremes and Nina Simone, while turning out compositions that were entirely and uniquely her own. Notable admirers include Elvis Costello, Elton John, and Patti Smith, but the lofty celebrity adulation does little to dispel the mystique that still surrounds the late artist.
For the uninitiated, it’s challenging to find a proper starting point to appreciate her art; Laura Nyro’s development as a songwriter is gradual and incredibly subtle. Yet, her progress (for the nearly 30 years that she wrote and recorded) produces a deep and rich work, with a passion that burns blue and a lightness that yields winging melodies, a contrast that expresses an approach both intuitive and disciplined.
Hear My Story: The Collection, 1966-1995 (issued by Madfish Records) compiles the entirety of Laura Nyro’s work (19 discs altogether), gathering plain sailings and storms in a box that contains the life of a truly remarkable musician. With ten studio albums, six live albums, and two discs of rare material to explore, this CD collection offers an exhaustive amount of history that paints a very detailed portrait of the woman behind the songs. Her most celebrated recordings, More Than a New Discovery and Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, stand as significant examples of 1960s popular music and essential snapshots of a New York culture long gone and now immortalized through these songs.
More Than a New Discovery (released in 1967), Laura Nyro’s official debut, is serviced in this collection with both the original mono and a stereo remastering of the album. Here, then, is the first taste of Laura Nyro’s talents. The bulk of the album builds upon the structures of simple soul numbers that are at once improvised and polished through a perspicacious drive; a self-taught pianist, Nyro is an imperfect but always-knowing player who leads with clear intent, her passion constantly skimming the boundaries of convention.
It is the lusty (and lustful) enterprise of her songwriting that gives numbers like “Goodbye Joe” and “Stoney End” their irrepressible swing and sense of drama. Brassy jaunts, they blush with warm life, and are bright with big band arrangements that detail the swelling soul-pop with paisley design. Quieter affairs like “I Never Meant to Hurt You” bring the high drama down to the jazzier ends of her art and find roomy platforms for their enveloping atmospheres. Nyro’s voice, a ribboning tenor that gently dips and then seagull-soars, is in splendid form, commanding the numbers with a confidence that always inspires the listener’s confidence in her compositional abilities.
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968), arguably the most exemplary work in her catalogue, expands the borders that contained her most private passions on More Than a New Discovery. The songs here are more focused, at once leaner, and elaborate in their instrumentation. A horn-laden affair that flirts with rhythm switch-ups and playfully explores mixed meters, Nyro’s sophomore effort smartly compacts the best of her gifts into spaces that comfortably accommodate the jazzy arrangements.
Swinging blues-pop numbers like “Luckie” and “Lu” are Formica-slicked pieces that give credence to the fervent glides of her voice. “Lu”, in particular, pivots on a rhythm switch that rotates the brass for sass. “Poverty Train” especially mines a seductive groove that shoulders elegantly against a slinky melody. When Laura Nyro’s voice nestles into its preferred niche, the torch song, it unfolds its many dimensions to reveal the layers and textures that her more pop-oriented jaunts often obscure; “Emmie”, a string-soaked ballad that curves graciously into the nuances of her alternately wheeling and lilting vocals, is possibly the best of her tender moments.
On “Eli’s Comin’” and “Woman’s Blues”, a smart funk engenders the rhythmic struts, falling perfectly in step with her vocal syncopations. Overall, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is the work that places the jewel in the crown of Nyro’s impressive output; a stone-cold classic for the “Stone Souled Picnic” she endeavors on these 13 sumptuous swingers of jazz, blues, and pop
1969’s New York Tendaberry is a moodier batch of songs that pools the feelings of regret and desire to congeal into a more contemplative and somber work. The growth in maturity in Laura Nyro’s voice is particularly noticeably on opener “You Don’t Love Me When I Cry” and its following tracks, “Captain for Dark Mornings”, and “Tom Cat Goodbye”, where it develops a powerhouse virtuosity and reaches frightening and towering crescendos.
Many of these numbers forsake the first two albums’ horns and Brill Building pop strings. Much more a piano affair, with lines that circle and run through a stark and open field, Nyro muses from a decidedly uncluttered space to manage emotion and sound. A dark and forceful passion drives “Gibsom Street”, its instrumentation scaling the heights of some New York cathedral and ringing out with clamoring echoes from the majestic spires. On the title track and “The Man Who Sends Me Home”, the singer scans circuitous melodies against her narratives of longing and strife, bringing each number home to a troubled and uncertain end.
Laura Nyro ushers a work of stymied pop-rock on Christmas and the Beads of Sweat into the 1970s. Released in 1970, Nyro’s fourth album aims for a middle ground between soothing harmonies and upbeat rhythms. Not nearly as passionate as her first two releases or as brooding as New York Tendabarry, the singer still manages to carve a compelling work out of comparably minor material. If the polish of Christmas and the Beads of Sweat feels a little too slick, it never obscures Nyro’s knack for a good tune; the smooth arrangements on “Blackpatch” admit a supple melody that grips the ear with a honeyed chorus. Meanwhile, spare piano numbers like “Been a Train” and “Map to the Treasure” showcase an artist who is continually developing a power through a focused restraint.
A turnabout on 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle shows Laura Nyro’s interpretive strengths, covering R&B hits of the 1950s and 1960s. These covers retain their trademark Nyro-isms, but they also bend graciously to the whims of the originals’ essences. Backed by the 1960s girl group Labelle, Nyro explores these numbers with a restraint that does not obscure the inherent sensuality in either the song’s original or Nyro’s delivery of it.
The Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”, penned by Smokey Robinson, strolls leisurely for its first two thirds before breaking into a gait that picks up a little more inflection as the tempo increases. Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem” also benefits from a rise in tempo here; in Nyro’s hands, she turns the once dreamy lullaby into a supple blues jam. Her rendition of “Nowhere to Run” retains Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ dancefloor groove but revises the melody just a little to give it some 1960s New York swing.
A covers album may have seen Laura Nyro biding her time for the shift toward the slightly more experimental waters that would begin with Smile (1976). The aura of soul and R&B still imbues each of these numbers as it does her prior works, but there is now a folky persuasion that signals a maturity to her work. “Sexy Mama”, the opening number, is a smooth slab of glossy jazz-pop, etched with the strums of acoustic guitar. The echoes of such a lush exercise can be found on the equally folkish “Money”.
However, much of the album favors gently carnal torch-songs and offers such earthy delights like “Midnite Blue”, “Stormy Love”, and “I Am the Blues”; numbers that are bathed in sonically rich atmospheres that induce the pleasantly bittersweet aftertaste of yearning and loss. Smile is easily one of Nyro’s best works, an album to demonstrate an artist’s ability to coat her work with an attractively slick production polish without relinquishing an ounce of heart or soul.
Laura Nyro continued her mellower surveys of folk-pop in 1978’s Nested, an album that upped the folk quotient in her brand of soul-pop. Her voice now leveled to a more measured croon rather than the beltings of an out-and-out diva, Nyro explores themes that align themselves with the then cresting wave of feminist music and literature in the late 1970s. Here, the approach is more considered, perhaps even cautious, and the numbers on Nested delicately ribbon out in a careful release of emotion and sound.
“Crazy Love” walks meditative circles around a softly careening vocal that peaks only occasionally with the power that once drove her voice to such astonishing heights. The soft rock of “American Deamer” manages a voluptuous turn in its instrumentation despite its relatively minimal design. That minimalism finds an even lusher nook in “Springblown”, the warm airs of its summery drift giving the number a nearly tactile sense of its folk-psychedelia.
Laura Nyro hunkers down into a rabbit hole that feeds her all the comfort and wonderment of motherhood, a theme visited now and then on the album. The least known (and perhaps least understood) of all her albums, Nested was a commercial disaster (though a critical success), sinking deep into obscurity and then out of print until it was rediscovered and reissued 30 years on from its initial release.
In the years following, the singer would struggle to get a creative foothold in her songwriting, releasing material six years following Nested. Her eighth studio album, 1984’s Mother Spiritual, expands on the topics of motherhood she explored on Nested. Still full of the soft warmth that featured on its predecessor, Mother Spiritual adjusts the template to encompass a few modern touches; listen closely and you can hear the strains of some new wave guitar. It would seem like an anomalous element, but those shadings of ‘80s popular music meld well into the structures of Nyro’s fiercely original compositions.
Domestic life is charted on the album’s opener “To a Child”, a honey-dipped paean to her child that is given a mildly serrated edge with those aforementioned new wave guitars. Many midtempo ballads fill out the album, saturating the air with a weather that never chills or scorches but settles like warm breath; swooning numbers like the lushed-out “Late for Love” recall Annette Peacock in her more pensive moments, with their undulating rhythms and moody ambiance.
Uptempo numbers like “Sophia”, “Melody in the Sky”, and “Talk to a Green Tree” don’t do much to shake up the calm, but they do remind the listener of Nyro’s earlier, funkier exploits that gave previous works like Eli and the Thirteenth Confession such undecimated power.
By this point, Laura Nyro’s output had become increasingly sporadic. It would be nearly ten years until she recorded another album. In 1993, she released Walk the Dog and Light the Light, the album that would be the last of hers released during her lifetime. There seems here an arousing from a restful slumber, a jubilance that gives these songs crisper arrangements; the hazy lines of her folkier late 1970s works are brought into sharper focus here and showcase her voice as the material’s primary instrument.
This time, the drums snap, and the guitars chug with happy urgency. The first half of the album, including “The Descent of Luna Rose”, is dedicated to mainly uptempo jazz-pop, as smooth and glossy as porcelain but with enough bite to make one lean in closely to take in all the storied passions. The second half of the album, devoted to ballads, shows true form in their sparse arrangements, recalling her torch-song years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While still a powerful force as a songwriter’s songwriter, Nyro had begun to show a weary hand, a sense of resignation that gives these songs a feeling of spent joy.
Recorded between 1994 and 1995, Angel in the Dark was released posthumously in 2001, following the singer’s death from ovarian cancer in 1997. A collection of originals and covers, the songs here are weary and mine a bluesier sort of melancholia – one that doesn’t necessarily negate the rhythms and sways of the arrangements but weighs them down like a heavy heart.
As Nyro was undergoing chemotherapy during the recording of the album, there is a sense of uncertainty, perhaps anxiety, that shrouds these numbers, and, much the way she has done on any work, she stories those emotions into the vessel of her voice. Her voice here has a heaviness; the highs are not so high anymore, the lows skimming the depths in the valleys of her grief. The best of these are the originals, many of which showcase Nyro’s voice and just her piano.
“Serious Playground”, “Triple Goddess Twilight”, and “Animal Grace”, each one a piano ballad, all evince a sincere feeling of longing that uncomfortably relays a sense of time running out. There are plenty of joyful moments as well, and the best of them, “Gardenia Talk”, another Nyro original, revisits some of the more percolating grooves of her earlier works, its conga-laced lite-jam finding seductive pleasures and brighter color amidst the inky blues of the album.
Angel in the Dark stands as a curious and unsettled recording to cap a rich and varied body of work that has marked and defined a singular and startling talent. Recorded during a most ambivalent and transitional point in her life, it is a haunting close to a career and a life that tuned popular music anew – the end of a story of a woman who spoke her deepest truths through song.
Included in this collection are two discs of rare material (one disc an early demo from 1966, and another disc of alternate takes and rare songs), and six live albums. The two discs of rare material offer a glimpse of a highly prolific woman who wasted no time working. The demo gives a sense of Nyro’s ability to arrange her compositions, a material in formation practiced initially through sheer passion and the will to get up and perform.
Each of the six live discs reveals a naturally reticent woman now given a wide platform to indulge in her talents before an adoring audience. The live recordings are a strange dance between a performer’s natural exhibition and the true introversion of a young woman who didn’t care much for the glare of a spotlight. These live albums show the real and unmistakable talent of Laura Nyro and how her work was born from an innate ability to express her deepest emotions through music and singing. The performances in these live shows are, for the most part, simple and plain but always potent and pure.
Completing the collection is a photo album-sized book of photos and essays that discuss the artist’s work at length, her artistic practices, her mystique, and her life away from the spotlight (her son Gill Bianchini provides some interesting candid photos). Industry folk provide their insights into the reclusive singer and reveal that the world didn’t take to Nyro initially and that her music was a hard sell.
The quality of these remastered discs is outstanding, and the music on these reissues breathes easily and freely, allowing the arrangements to shine beautifully, no matter how complex or simple. The remasters offer a nice balance between the high and the low ends. Laura Nyro’s voice centers handsomely in the mix, never sinking below or riding obtrusively over the music. Each CD album is packaged into a cardboard gatefold sleeve and features the original album artwork.