By Bergotte
Laura Nyro wrote some of the most commercially successful songs of the late 1960s. She also made some of the least commercially successful records of that era — records so strange, so emotionally extreme, so structurally unwilling to behave, that the music industry dealt with her the way a mining company deals with inconvenient geology: it extracted what it could use and left the rest. Her songs became hits for other people. Her own recordings became the private property of a devoted few. She died at forty-nine, in 1997, still largely unknown to the general public that had been humming her melodies for thirty years. The argument of her body of work — urgent, wild, sacred, exhausting, unlike anything before or since — is that the human soul contains more than the popular song is built to hold, and that the attempt to pour it in anyway, regardless of the overflow, is an act of artistic necessity.
The Bronx, the piano, the church that wasn’t hers
Laura Nyro was born in New York City in 1947, grew up in the Bronx, and absorbed music the way children raised near the ocean absorb salt — through the air, constantly, without effort. Her father Louis Nigro was a jazz trumpeter who played in clubs and taught music, and the apartment was full of records: jazz, pop, the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Broadway cast albums, the doo-wop that drifted up from the street. Her mother’s family was Jewish, and though Nyro was not observant, the synagogue’s particular relationship between melody and devotion — the sense that music and the sacred were continuous with each other, that singing was a form of prayer whether or not it was directed at God — soaked into everything she made.
But the decisive influence was Black gospel music. Nyro heard it in church recordings, in the call-and-response structures of the soul music that dominated New York radio in the early 1960s, in the way a voice could hold a syllable past the point of mere meaning and become something else, something less verbal and more physical, something that addressed the body before it addressed the mind. She was a white Jewish girl from the Bronx who sang like someone for whom gospel was an inheritance rather than an influence, and this combination — Tin Pan Alley harmonic sophistication, the Jewish melismatic tradition, Black gospel and soul, the restless intelligence of someone who had grown up surrounded by jazz — produced a hybrid that could not be reduced to any of its sources and sounded, to anyone who heard it fresh, like a completely new thing.
She taught herself to play piano by ear and then formally, and by her mid-teens she was writing songs of such melodic fluency and harmonic originality that they were clearly, already, the work of someone with a gift that would not stay contained. She performed at hootenannies in the Village, wrote constantly, made demos in the way young New York musicians did, and came to the attention of industry people who immediately recognised her commercial potential without entirely understanding what they were dealing with.
The 1967 Monterey disaster that wasn’t
Before the records, there is the Monterey International Pop Festival of June 1967, which has become a fixed point in the Nyro mythology — and which illustrates, with painful efficiency, the nature of the problem.
Monterey was the festival that announced the arrival of a generation. Janis Joplin announced herself. Otis Redding announced himself. Jimi Hendrix set fire to a guitar. The audience of sixty thousand was primed for revelation. Nyro appeared in a glittering black dress, backed by a trio, and performed an intense, internally absorbed set that seemed to be taking place slightly outside normal time — she was singing directly to herself as much as to the crowd, moving through her songs with the concentration of someone following a private logic that she was not obliged to share. The crowd was baffled, then restless, then actively hostile. She left the stage to open jeering.
This is routinely described as a humiliation. It was, from one angle. From another, it was a precise diagnostic: here was an artist whose work could not be apprehended at festival scale, in a crowd, outdoors, in the bright California afternoon. Her music was intimate not in the recording-technique sense that Drake’s was intimate, but in the philosophical sense — it assumed a particular quality of attention, a willingness to follow someone into a private world, that crowds of sixty thousand do not bring and cannot be asked to bring. She was not playing to the back row. She had never played to the back row. That was not a flaw. It was a fundamental formal decision.
She went home to New York and made records.
Eli and the world she built inside a song
Her first album, More Than a New Discovery, appeared in 1966 on a small label and was almost entirely ignored until her songs from it — “Wedding Bell Blues,” “And When I Die,” “Stoned Soul Picnic” — became hits for other artists. Her second album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, released in 1968 on Columbia, is where the full dimensions of what she was doing became audible.
The record runs for just over forty minutes and in that time it passes through more emotional states than most artists manage in a career. This is not hyperbole. Nyro’s songs are structurally unlike almost anything in the contemporary pop or rock landscape, because they refuse the convention of the single sustained mood. A Nyro composition will begin in one tempo, one key, one emotional register — and then shift, without warning and without apology, into something entirely different. “Eli’s Comin'” starts as a tense, gospel-driven warning and suddenly opens into something almost tender before snapping shut again. “Stoned Soul Picnic” moves between urban heat and bucolic fantasy within the same verse. “The Confession” is three minutes of dense psychological self-examination that changes direction so frequently it can feel, on first listen, like several songs loosely stitched together — until you hear it enough times to understand that the structure is the meaning, that the lurching from one emotional reality to another is precisely what it is like to be inside a feeling rather than observing it from outside.
This structural approach was radical in 1968 and remains radical now. The popular song, in almost every tradition, is built on consistency — a groove established and maintained, a mood set up and delivered, a promise made in the first verse and kept through the chorus. Nyro broke this contract deliberately and repeatedly. She was not interested in the sustained mood. She was interested in the way moods actually move through a person — abruptly, contradictorily, with the irrational logic of emotional truth rather than the rational logic of song craft.
Her voice was the instrument through which these shifts were achieved, and it was a voice of extraordinary range and power. She moved from the low, almost spoken register of someone thinking aloud to a soaring full-throated cry within a single phrase, and the transitions were never smooth in the polished session-singer sense but always slightly rough, always slightly costly, as if the effort of the shift was part of what she was communicating. When Nyro reaches for a high note it sounds like reaching — like something being stretched toward rather than simply occupied. The imperfection is the feeling.
New York Tendaberry: the city as inner state
New York Tendaberry, released in 1969, is the album that most fully realises her ambition and most clearly announces the terms on which she was working. The title is her own coinage — “tendaberry” as a blending of tender and tender-hearted, a softness that carries within it the sharp specific texture of the city — and the album is an attempt to make of New York not simply a setting but a condition, an emotional climate, a way of being.
The piano playing here is central in a way it had not quite been before. Nyro was a pianist of considerable technical ability and very particular sensibility — her left hand established bass figures that moved independently of her right hand’s melody, creating a sense of multiple voices in conversation that gave even the solo performances a feeling of fullness. On New York Tendaberry the production, by Nyro herself with arranger Jimmie Haskell, surrounds the piano with orchestration that seems to breathe and shift like weather. This is not the precise, classical elegance of Robert Kirby’s string arrangements for Nick Drake. It is something more turbulent, more unpredictable, music that arrives and departs like the city itself.
“Save the Country” is the album’s most explicitly political moment — a hymn, almost, to the possibility of collective transformation, written in 1968 in the wreckage of that year’s assassinations and upheavals, and it burns with the particular fervour of someone who actually believes that music can do something in the world. It is the song in which her gospel inheritance is most naked: the structure is pure church, the call building and building until it breaks open into the chorus, and the chorus demanding something — come on people, come on children, come on down to the glory river — with the unself-conscious intensity of genuine religious feeling. Nyro was not particularly religious. She was spiritual in a way that gathered everything in — the sacred and the erotic, the political and the personal, the street and the soul — and refused to sort them into separate categories.
“New York Tendaberry,” the title track, is the album’s centrepiece and its strangest achievement. It is a song about the city as a beloved, about the relationship between a person and the place that made them, and it shifts through so many tempos and moods and harmonic regions in its five minutes that a first-time listener may feel lost. The feeling of lostness is appropriate. It is what the song is about: the particular disorientation of being deeply, helplessly at home somewhere. She was twenty-one when she wrote it.
The songs she gave away and why it stings
Between 1967 and 1970, Nyro’s songs became hits in other people’s hands on a scale that was, by any commercial measure, remarkable. Blood, Sweat and Tears took “And When I Die” into the top ten. The Fifth Dimension had major hits with “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Sweet Blindness,” and “Wedding Bell Blues.” Three Dog Night reached number one with “Eli’s Comin’.” Barbra Streisand and other artists recorded her songs with the understanding that they were, in industry terms, gold — melodically irresistible, emotionally rich, structurally accessible in the versions produced for other artists’ voices even when they were structurally radical in Nyro’s own.
The strangeness of this situation deserves full examination, because it is the most eloquent possible illustration of what the music industry does with genius it cannot package.
The songs were not simplified in the covers, exactly. They were regularised. The tempo shifts were smoothed out. The rough, reaching vocal quality was replaced with professional perfection. The gospel extremity was dialled back to gospel flavour. What remained was the melody and the emotional core — both undeniable, both utterly hers — presented in a form that audiences could consume without the experience of being pushed slightly off balance, of being asked to follow someone into a private emotional country without a map.
The hits were real. The talent that generated them was Nyro’s. The financial rewards, through her publishing, were substantial. And none of it brought her the kind of recognition that would have required the general public to encounter her own voice, her own performances, her own structural strangeness. She was being mined. The ore that came out was valuable. The mine itself remained inaccessible.
She understood this with perfect clarity and appears to have been damaged by it without being destroyed. In 1970 she married a carpenter named David Bianchini, moved to Massachusetts, and essentially withdrew from the music industry for several years. The withdrawal was not a breakdown. It was, on the available evidence, a considered decision to choose life over the particular kind of life that being a commercial artist required.
Gonna Take a Miracle: the answer
Before the withdrawal completed itself, she made one more record of the first period that stands as both an anomaly and an explanation. Gonna Take a Miracle, released in 1971, was made in collaboration with the Philadelphia soul producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and it consists entirely of cover versions — the songs of Nyro’s youth, the doo-wop and soul and gospel standards that had formed her. “I Met Him on a Sunday.” “Nowhere to Run.” “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle.” “Jimmy Mack.” “Spanish Harlem.”
The record is an act of testimony: this is where I come from, these are the sources, this is the water I was drinking when the music entered me. It is also, and this is what makes it genuinely moving rather than merely interesting, an act of reciprocity — a white Jewish artist returning to the Black musical tradition she had absorbed, returning it in a form that acknowledged the debt without appropriating the source. Gamble and Huff brought in the vocal group LaBelle — Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash — and the combination of Nyro’s piano and voice with LaBelle’s harmonies is one of the most purely joyful things she ever recorded.
It was also, she seems to have understood, a kind of farewell — or at least a pause. She was giving back before going quiet. The record sounds like someone settling an account before leaving town.
The return and the late work
She came back, eventually, as serious artists always do. Smile (1976) returned her to original compositions with a quieter, more inward quality than the early albums — the extremity dialled back not from timidity but from the particular authority of someone who no longer needs to prove the extremity is there. Nested (1978) and Mother’s Spiritual (1984) continued this evolution, the music growing more explicitly ecological, more explicitly feminist, more concerned with the natural world and the female body and the relationship between them. She had a son in 1978 and the experience of motherhood moved through the subsequent work like a river through a changed landscape.
The late albums received little attention. This had long since stopped being surprising. What is striking, listening to them now, is the consistency of the underlying sensibility: the same refusal to separate the sacred from the erotic, the same structural willingness to follow the emotional logic wherever it leads, the same voice — somewhat deeper by now, more worn, more inhabited — reaching for notes with the same quality of costly effort.
Walk the Dog and Light the Light, released in 1993, was her last studio album of original material and contains some of her most fully realised writing — the title track alone, which opens with a piano figure of such unassuming authority that it sounds inevitable, is evidence of an artist at the absolute height of their powers at forty-five. Nobody bought it. Critics who reviewed it praised it with the slightly tired warmth reserved for beloved figures who have stopped mattering commercially. She gave interviews in which she spoke about her garden, her son, her friends, the importance of living at a human scale.
In January 1997 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died in April of that year, at her home in Danbury, Connecticut. She was forty-nine.
What was actually lost
It is worth trying to say, as precisely as possible, what the world does not have because Laura Nyro died at forty-nine and was only fully heard by a small number of people during her lifetime.
It does not have a model for the kind of music she was making — the fully hybrid, structurally free, gospel-inflected, harmonically sophisticated, emotionally extreme song-form that she invented and that nobody has successfully taken up since. The artists who cite her as an influence — among them Prince, who kept her albums in heavy rotation; Rickie Lee Jones, who absorbed the New York street poetry and the jazz harmony; Elton John, who has said her records changed his understanding of what the piano could do; Maria McKee; the young Phoebe Bridgers — they absorbed elements, individual nutrients from the compound. Nobody has attempted the compound itself, perhaps because the compound required not just technique but the specific personality that generated it: the total refusal to separate thought from feeling, the body from the spirit, the private from the political.
She was also, and this is the thing the music industry found hardest to process, a woman who treated her own artistic vision as non-negotiable. Not aggressively — she was by most accounts warm and generous and self-deprecating in person — but structurally. The songs did what they needed to do. The records sounded like they needed to sound. If the industry could not accommodate that, the industry could find her songs elsewhere, in more manageable versions, under other people’s names.
This is the third variation on the cluster’s central theme. Mitchell bent the world toward her, through sheer force of sustained ambition and the luck of having enough commercial success in the middle period to buy the space for the difficult work on either side. Drake withdrew so completely that the world only found him after he was gone. Nyro occupied a stranger position than either: present, productive, commercially significant in the most indirect way, and yet fundamentally unreachable to the culture that was benefiting from her. The songs were in the air. She was not.
The tendaberry that remains
Start with Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Put on headphones. Listen to “Timer” — a song that runs barely two minutes, in which Nyro’s voice moves from whisper to cry and back again over a piano that seems to be thinking rather than accompanying, a song whose subject is time and loss and the particular loneliness of knowing that you are alive and that it will not last — and pay attention to the moment, somewhere in the first minute, where she does something with her voice that has no name in the vocabulary of pop or soul or gospel, something that combines all three traditions and exceeds all three, something that sounds less like a musical technique than like a person briefly unable to contain what they are feeling.
That is the Laura Nyro experience. That moment, repeated across eight studio albums in various forms, is the thing that cannot be extracted and given to someone else. The Fifth Dimension could take the melody. Blood Sweat and Tears could take the structure. Nobody could take that moment. It lived only in her voice, in her performances, in the records she made on the terms she set, for the audience that found her.
The audience that finds her now will find everything intact. The records do not age in the way that most late 1960s pop ages, because they were never quite of their moment — they were too strange for 1968, too singular to belong to any particular year. They belong to the permanent category of things made at the limit of what a person can honestly say, in the form that the honesty required, regardless of who was listening.
The tendaberry is still there. It is waiting.
Sources and further reading
Primary works
Nyro, Laura. More Than a New Discovery. Verve Forecast, 1967. Reissued as The First Songs, Columbia, 1973. Nyro, Laura. Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Columbia, 1968. Nyro, Laura. New York Tendaberry. Columbia, 1969. Nyro, Laura. Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Columbia, 1970. Nyro, Laura, and LaBelle. Gonna Take a Miracle. Columbia, 1971. Nyro, Laura. Smile. Columbia, 1976. Nyro, Laura. Mother’s Spiritual. Columbia, 1984. Nyro, Laura. Walk the Dog and Light the Light. Columbia, 1993.
Critical and biographical writing
Merenstein, Michele. “Laura Nyro: The Biography.” The Laura Nyro Website (lauranyro.com). Merenstein’s extensively researched online biography remains the most thorough account of Nyro’s life and remains the best single starting point for a general reader.
Weller, Sheila. Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation. Atria Books, 2008. Does not focus on Nyro, but the cultural context it provides for the female singer-songwriter world of the late 1960s and early 1970s illuminates Nyro’s position within and against that world.
Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. Dutton, 1975. Marcus does not write about Nyro directly, but his framework for understanding American popular music as a carrier of cultural mythology is the most useful critical lens through which to approach her gospel-soul inheritance.
Hoskyns, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los Angeles. St. Martin’s Press, 1996. The Los Angeles music world context; valuable for understanding the Asylum Records ecosystem and the commercial infrastructure within which Nyro’s New York sensibility was such a deliberate anomaly.
On the music itself
The essential companion to the recordings is the set of liner notes written by Nyro herself for the 1997 Columbia retrospective Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro — released just weeks after her death. Her own account of the songs, their origins, their intentions, is one of the most illuminating pieces of self-commentary by any artist in the popular music canon, and its elegiac quality, given the timing, is almost unbearable.
Prince’s use of Nyro as a touchstone is documented in various interviews; his 2004 and 2012 comments on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession as a “manual” are worth seeking out as evidence of the depth of her influence on an artist who rarely acknowledged debts.
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