The 8xLP box set gathers the ’60s and ’70s studio recordings of a singer-songwriter whose melodically intricate work had a profound impact on Joni Mitchell, Elton John, and Steely Dan.
Laura Nyro’s first album was called More Than a New Discovery, and the message implicit in that title was indicative of the way people talked about the Bronx songwriter early in her career. The marketing was hyperbolic. The expectations were unreasonable. And, more often than not, Nyro lived up to all of it. Only 19 when her debut album was released in 1966, she soon became famous for writing hits for other artists—one week in November 1969, three of the Top 10 songs in the country were her compositions, as interpreted by the 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Three Dog Night. Her own music, however—performed at the piano and sung in a voice that galloped between octaves as if auditioning for all the roles in a musical at once—aspired to places beyond the charts.
History looks fondly upon artists who prove themselves commercially yet seek to occupy more artful territory. Like so many of them, Nyro’s greatest legacy is in the wide range of artists she influenced: Joni Mitchell was inspired by her inventive piano playing; Elton John found his voice within her detail-rich songwriting; both Todd Rundgren and the members of Steely Dan took early influence from her jazzy, meticulous melodies; Bette Midler wanted to sing like her; Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane spent studio time alongside her.
Some of these artists’ testimonies appear in Peter Doggett’s liner notes for a new box set, American Dreamer, which collects Nyro’s studio output from the 1960s and 1970s, all remastered on vinyl along with a bonus LP of familiar demos and live recordings. Reading her biography from beginning to end is intense, and it’s a little heartbreaking to realize the extent to which she was misunderstood despite her obvious, prodigious talent. But, as she always intended, her story is best told through her music. These albums are so melodically intricate, so carefully performed, so thematically ambitious—encompassing life, death, love, religion, addiction, politics—you can hear why so many musicians around her tore up whatever they were working on and decided to take their craft a little more seriously.
The key element to Nyro’s approach was freedom. Her songs would begin and end whenever she wanted, fragmented or extended into symphonic mantras. When one melody had done its work, she would shift to another one entirely, often with no warning. (It is no surprise that she preferred playing solo, without the constraints of explaining herself to collaborators.) Her primary influences were girl groups, soul music, and gospel, and what she seemed to admire was the way these styles were built to move an audience: Her most memorable songs, like 1968’s “Poverty Train,” would speed and slow abruptly, as if she noticed someone in the audience who seemed unmoved, and so she climbed out to meet them and adjusted her delivery to suit that particular person. She would not leave the room until everyone had been engaged.
Two of the albums in this box set are unabashed classics: 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which offers a timeless survey of Nyro’s gifts as a songwriter and several of her most indelible songs (“Stoned Soul Picnic,“ “Emmie”), and 1969’s New York Tendaberry, which focuses on her more ambitious side with virtuosic, often solo performances. But the centerpiece is 1970’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, a two-part album that, for my money, stands as her finest work: Side A consists of music she performed with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, showing how easily she could have transitioned into the ’70s as a rock artist. On the second side is her most spiritual, visionary work: a suite of long, interconnected songs with harp from Alice Coltrane and piano performances that intend to sweep you away. Ranging from the tightly wound “Brown Earth” to the sprawling “Christmas in My Soul,” it is the album of hers I would recommend to newcomers.
The surrounding records are also strong. 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle, a tribute to her beloved era of girl groups, recorded with the vocal trio Labelle, remains a joyful exercise in one of her more crowd-pleasing modes. And her debut, More Than a New Discovery—the only album here created with blatant commercial aspirations—places her earliest compositions in chiming mid-’60s arrangements, smoothed out for radio play. The irony is that the message in its title wasn’t taken seriously: The label paired Nyro with session musicians, barring her from playing the piano herself, and while the music still resonates, its pop sound makes it an anomaly in her catalog. As if to prove that point, this new edition comes with an enormous hype sticker promoting the single “Wedding Bell Blues”—a retro attempt at reproducing the original packaging that ends up obscuring the gorgeous, stark photography on the cover.
If there’s another gripe I have with the set, it’s that it perpetuates a myth that Nyro’s career ended in the ’70s. After her hits dried up for other artists, and after the towering artistic triumphs of Eli and Tendaberry, the word on Nyro is that she retreated: Never mind that she still put out great albums while balancing live shows with the needs of her family, or that her work continued to influence singer-songwriters through each successive decade. The music she made during these later years was often remarkable—1976’s Smile, a quietly stirring tribute to her late mother, and 1978’s expertly written Nested represent this era in the box, but later albums like 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual and 1993’s Walk the Dog and Light the Light are just as essential to her story.
Like so much about Nyro, these subtle, joyful albums were destined to remain in the dark. Where plenty of artists become disgruntled with the music industry, Nyro refused to grow bitter: She instead decided to observe its mechanisms from a distance, to focus on her own evolution and take greater comfort in her journey. She began writing more sharply about capitalism—“Money,” on Smile, was an early stab—and feminism. “[S]ometimes I think being a star is kind of silly,” she told Melody Maker in 1976. “What does it make everyone else? I’d sooner be looked on as a comrade rather than a star.” And so she began living her life increasingly out of the spotlight: performing solo at clubs only when she felt like it, operating on her own schedule, and mostly avoiding public appearances.
For an artist who brushed so closely with the mainstream, this desire for complete control felt uncommon, and it can be observed throughout her career. As proposed release dates came and went, as she attempted to accompany her LPs with specific fragrances to better situate listeners within their settings, and as she tried to explain to her accompanists what particular color to conjure as they found their way around her words, Nyro slowly learned that the only person in the industry worth pleasing was herself. There is a story about Nyro that has been told to the point of cliche, but it bears repeating. When she auditioned as a teenager for Clive Davis at Columbia Records, she sat at the piano and didn’t take to the lighting in his hotel room. Instead, she requested total darkness, with just the television on, so that its glow would light the room. What might have seemed like an eccentricity turned out to be a keen awareness of the most natural environment for her music. As I sit listening to these records tonight, alone in my apartment with the television on mute, I can feel her worlds becoming real.
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