The Laura Nyro Experience (Part Three)
The conclusion of a three-part essay on the joy and wonder of Laura Nyro
Hello one last time (for now, at least) from the Laura Nyro universe. Writing about her, surrounding myself with her music and pondering her artistry, legacy and importance has been the most rewarding experience of my creative life in the five years since I launched my publication here. I hope what I have written over the past six-and-a-half weeks is worthy of her. For those who haven’t checked out part one and two of the essay, here they are (part one and part two).
If there is one thing that I didn’t get into the essay, it’s this: in a time where some “music” critics sneer at songwriting and are flippant about the very subject they are supposed to be experts about, and where human creativity is devalued in favour of AI slop, Laura Nyro stands tall as a model of artistic integrity and in her belief that creativity is a sacred, human act that we should hold tight and closely guard against any and all incursions that may dilute it.
The Laura Nyro Experience (Part Three)
By: Robert C. Gilbert
“Sister
Brother
Are we born to learn
The art of love?”
- from ‘Art of Love,’ written by Laura Nyro
The last project Laura Nyro worked on was a greatest-hits collection. Columbia gave her control over the recordings selected to be spread over two compact discs. She was insistent that her early albums would not overshadow the albums that came afterwards. Everything would be given equal weight. She did, however, relent on agreeing to include the version of ‘Save the Country’ she recorded with Bones Howe in 1968, the one time she consented to “sock it to the people.”
She choose more songs from what would be her final album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light, than the better-known New York Tendaberry or Gonna Take a Miracle. Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro was released in February 1997, just before Nyro’s passing from ovarian cancer at 49—cruelly just as her mother had. Notably three years later, a single-CD collection of her music was released, Time and Love: The Essential Masters, that only included one cut made after she returned to recording in 1975 after a three-year absence.
That’s understandable. It’s hard to not want to fix Laura Nyro at that moment in time when her influence was at its height and she was the dark queen of New York, channeling both the joys and travails of living in the city but always headstrong and windswept as she was on the cover of New York Tendaberry.
By the time she was 23, she had recorded five albums, all acknowledged classics and, depending on one’s opinion, some of them masterpieces, all holding up mightily to repeated, even obsessive, listening. How many other artists can this be said? And even as Nyro took a break soon afterwards, she continued to make music, releasing six more albums, although just three after 1978.
They all hang in the background, neglected if not ignored with just one song, ‘To a Child…,’ recorded for both Mother’s Spiritual and Walk the Dog & Light the Light, having the immediate recognition of the dozens of songs she wrote in the late sixties and early seventies. They may even be an urge to avoid these albums lest they tarnish the image of the prodigious, the precocious Laura Nyro.
I know it took me years to eventually buy a copy of Smile and it was exactly that reason why I didn’t do so sooner. What if the music didn’t have the immediacy of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession? What if it was just average? That Nyro’s inspiration gradually deserted her after 1971 is not a controversial point even if it’s one I don’t necessarily share. David Geffen has claimed that after their partnership ended, she never wrote another good song. That’s sour grapes but Charlie Calello, as acute an appreciator of Nyro’s work as there has ever been, once put it this way about the songs she had written for Smile: “I thought she was in a creative mode, but not an exceptional creative mode,” adding: “I didn’t think she had the goods.”
Others thought the goods had begun to flee her even earlier. Todd Rundgren, as passionate a Laura Nyro disciple as there has ever been, wrote ‘Baby Let’s Swing’ about her after seeing her live at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in 1969. It asks her “where did the magic go?” It appeared as the beginning of an Abbey Road-like medley on his debut solo album, Runt. He once explained why write the song.
“It was she was already getting world weary at that point,” he said. “It was the difference between that and the Laura that I had been introduced to through Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. I felt some disappointment. I felt that she was constantly going for one sort of monotonal emotional pitch. It was a fairly low-energy thing that persisted for the entire rest of her career and her life.”
While there was a flattening of the emotional pitch of her music, Rundgren’s timing feels about eight years off, at least to me. But, regardless, what remained and what would always remain would be her gifts of communication; her voice as well as a continued unwillingness to follow conventional songcraft.
It never lost its toughness or its directness even when she employed irony. So when she started ‘The Right to Vote’ from 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual with, “thank you, sirs, for the right to vote / bet you didn’t know I had a voice in my throat,” it may take a moment to hear lyrics that are admittedly less than artful before being disarmed by the moxie of just cutting to the chase and proceeding to eviscerate a system that says “a woman’s place is to wait and serve,” where the choice of electoral politics is no choice at all (not always but the percentage ain’t high) and neither does religion offer much help.
Here, the rallying cry is not “save the people, save the children” but that “my place / is in a ship from space / to carry me / the hell out of here.” Singing such a wish without any apology or disappointment but just putting it out there is funny. It’s the kind of throw-up-one’s-arms-and-to-hell-with-it-all impulse that one would have expected of Nyro in the Reagan era or how she would be feeling today if she were still alive.
The kicker of it all is that the bridge which begins with the lyric: “all the colours in a race riot” of all things is gorgeous—another moment where she dazzles the mind and the ears with her imagination. She switches to that rush in her voice, the same mode employed on ‘Mercy on Broadway’ or ‘California Shoeshine Boys’ or ‘The Sweet Sky’ that cushioned against the notes as she glided through a phrase. It’s such a dreamy sound—a gushy way to put it, to be sure—but as Laura Nyro got older, her tone got richer and fuller. That’s somewhat improbable given how finely tuned her voice already was when she was 19.
She had shorn her voice of its youthful lack of inhibition, perhaps in recognition that she had bared all in her early twenties and needed to evolve. Similar to how, for example, Jagged Little Pill was a snapshot in time for Alanis Morissette, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was the same for Nyro. However, moving on does not equate repudiation and for me, the joy of digging into the music that came after is to discern the artistic purpose that continually motivated her. It just was no longer the only thing that concerned her.
After giving birth in 1978, Nyro again retreated from the music business; this time, to raise her son, Gillian being shortened to Gil.
This is a distance she would maintain for the rest of her life. “The music has always been in my life, but it goes from the front burner to the back burner, depending on what else is happening in my life. Also, not everybody likes dealing with the music business, certain aspects of the music business,” Nyro said in a 1993 interview with critic and my colleague here on Substack Wayne Robins (see Wayne’s full interview with Laura here). “Some talented people can't cut it in the music business, because it's not appealing to them and nurturing to them. I find it very natural and healthy to not always be dealing with the music business.”
In the early eighties, she began a relationship with Maria Desiderio, a painter. They would remain together for the rest of her life. True to Nyro's penchant for privacy, she never publicly addressed her sexuality. Her brother once said she considered herself woman-identified if she even needed to label herself at all.
It’s a term that has fallen into disuse. It originated with a group called the Radicalesbians, founded in New York in 1970. A manifesto from the group called The Woman-Identified Woman was given out at a protest of the National Organization for Women’s Second Congress to Unite Women to highlight the exclusion of lesbians from the burgeoning feminist movement. Essentially, to be woman-identified is to see all women as equal—whether straight, gay or otherwise—and that to be a feminist was to champion all women.
Indeed, Laura Nyro was in the vanguard of such ideology. She sang, “I’m mad at my country / and I’ve been treated bad” and reminding “I’m a woman” on ‘When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag’ from 1970 and earlier songs like ‘Stoney End,’ ‘Buy and Sell,’ ‘Poverty Train’ and ‘Lonely Women’ were similarly attuned to the lives and circumstances of women as was ‘Emmie,’ Nyro’s hymn to “the eternal feminine.”
It’s within this perspective that lies ‘The Right to Vote.’ The song is also a good introduction to the album on which it appeared, Mother’s Spiritual, released in 1984 and her first in six years. The edges that had gradually been eroded since Smile are almost entirely gone sound-wise although her lyrics remained sharp. Beside ‘The Right to Vote,’ there’s her singing “mama’s puttin’ on some warpaint / for a little bit of combat” on ‘A Wilderness.’
It was the second and last time she recorded an album in Danbury. Recording had become a kind of family affair for Nyro where she chose musicians as much for their chops as for their personal compatibility with her. The primary band included John K. Bristow on guitar, Elysa Sunshine on bass and Terry Silverlight on drums with Nydia Mata back on percussion plus her brother, Jan, on guitar as well as Julie Lyonn Lieberman on violin.
Bristow’s guitar has the kind of synth-y timbre that was prevalent in the eighties. It doesn’t date the album—it is very much as tangible and tactile as Nyro’s previous albums—and it is the primary element that gives Mother’s Spiritual a veneer that not even Nested had.
Nyro would cite it as the favourite of her albums. As pointed as it could be, it is also achingly sincere. I think of the movement into tempo on ‘Trees of the Ages,’ an ode to the omnipresence of trees every bit as rich as ‘New York Tendaberry’ was about the Big Apple. It suggests that Nyro had found tranquility in the country. She once said, “I could feel the spirit of mother and elves and I always feel that anytime I’m around the trees.” Another time, reflecting on writing the songs for Mother’s Spiritual, she called herself, “the Goddess of Creativity.”
The recording of the album spanned two years—over double the amount of time it look to get New York Tendaberry on tape.
At one point, she summoned Todd Rundgren to help. It was not the first time she had wanted him to contribute to her music. In the late sixties, she had asked him to consider being her bandleader. Rundgren, then still with the Nazz, declined. This time, she wanted to see if he could help her get some momentum in making the album. He said yes and went to Danbury.
While Rundgren is credited as playing synthesizer on two of the album’s tracks: ‘Man on the Moon’ and ‘Trees of the Ages,’ as well as lending production assistance, he found the experience disillusioning, feeling that the music continued to lack the fire that had electrified him fifteen years earlier on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.
That he tried to prod Nyro to think at least a little about commercial potential—to no avail, of course—shows that while his instincts were not wrong in terms of trying to make a record that could get on the radio, he had misjudged her as many others before him had.
Recalling the experience, he once said, “A typical session would be like, just finished take 23 and she said, ‘that was a nice one, let’s do another.’ And by the time she’s done, she’s got 35 takes of a song and then has to figure out which one to use, and quite obviously it’s like she doesn’t even know when it’s working or not.” He added: “I wanted to strangle her and maybe that would have made something happen but, you know, I loved Laura and it was kind of a shame she never got all of the recognition that she probably should have gotten.”
Of Mother’s Spiritual, he felt “you fall asleep listening to the record by the time you get to the end.” He did feel some of the songs were good. There was one he felt was great.
‘To a Child…’ starts the album and is about Nyro’s son, Gil. It is every bit as affecting as ‘Beautiful Boy,’ John Lennon’s ode to his second son, Sean, and full of the kind of observations and painterly imagery that only Laura Nyro could conjure. She sings of her son as being “an elf on speed” while she’s perpetually sleep deprived. She asks, “what is life? / did you read it / in a magazine?,” both a pun and a question with an elusive answer. There is the wish to “kiss the sun hello” and for “God and Goddess / [to] make his life a lovin’ thing.”
Over a light groove, Nyro makes her lyrics soar. One of my favourite moments of her on record is the slight quaver she adds to “is there hope / for a mother / and an elf on speed” and then there’s the pledge, “child I am here / to stand by you.”
Laura Nyro had a strong maternal instinct. Patti LaBelle once recalled how Nyro helped her deal with post-partum depression after she gave birth to her son, Zuri, in July 1973. In Michele Kort’s biography of Nyro, Soul Picnic, LaBelle remembers Nyro with her son rocking him to sleep under a tall tree.
A nurturing essence pervades Mother’s Spiritual. I hear it in the refrains of ‘Late for Love’ and ‘Roadnotes.’ Not to rag on Rundgren here, but the album is another of Nyro’s where the willingness to listen to several times, ideally once a day over the course of a week, unlocks its secrets. Never once did it induce me to slumber.
One of its delights is ‘Talk to a Green Tree.’ There’s a harmonic shift that may be the one time that Nyro dipped into Joni Mitchell territory (compare it to Mitchell’s ‘For Love or Money’). One verse has her contemplating a fantasy of getting a guy to trade places with her to provide “child care at home” and that it’s “no disgrace,” warning though that “after you’ve done it all / being daddy / be ready for the midnight hour.” Whether that means having to get up in the middle of the night for the baby or because mommy needs some loving is up to the listener to decide.
The title track illustrated the growing unity of all the facets of Laura Nyro’s artistry from its New York opening (“on a street corner where the kids boogie all night”) to more rural imagery (“wonders that take you, rivers that give”) to unity (“feel this love, my brothers and sisters”) to affirming love, not war (“it’s not war, it’s life she gives”). In ‘Mother’s Spiritual,’ all can find solace. It’s not all that different from ‘Save the Country,’ the hopeful, graceful message is just expressed meditatively as opposed to as a call to action. Call it spacey, call it new age-y or whatever condescending terms come to mind but to me, it expresses the abiding fearlessness of Laura Nyro.
Of all the blind spots I had in Nyro’s discography before this writing this essay—everything she recorded after Nested—Mother’s Spiritual is the one that most moved me. In a way, it represents her last truly grand artistic statement though there was more music to come, much of it which continued to fill in her worldview and wishes for this planet, and led to a convergence of everything that Nyro revealed of herself in her music.
A hint of that is in the medley that opens Laura: Laura Nyro Live at the Bottom Line, recorded in 1988 at the New York club and released in 1989 on Cypress Records, an indie label, after Columbia passed on releasing another live album by her. It pairs ‘The Confession,’ the most exhilarating moment on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, with ‘High Heel Sneakers,’ a rhythm-and-blues hit by Tommy Tucker, the stage name for Robert Higginbotham, from 1964. It is followed by the ethereal ‘Roll of the Ocean’ which name-checks John Coltrane and then ‘Companion,’ a swaying ballad that could have been recorded by a group like the Chiffons 25 years earlier. R&B, jazz, girl groups were three of the formative influences on Nyro. There was also soul. Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Leontyne Price. Mary Wells too.
The first 45s Laura Nyro bought were ‘Bye Bye Love’ by the Everly Brothers and ‘Mr. Lee’ by the Bobbettes. Don and Phil’s blend of country and rock and roll did not meaningfully move her beyond their harmonic blend but it’s easy to see and hear her taking the lead on ‘Mr. Lee’ when she was young and singing all over the Bronx.
Curtis Mayfield and, by extension, the Impressions loomed large and it’s neat to ponder the possibility of her music being beamed back to her through the shuffle of ‘Wherever You Leadeth Me’ or the voodoo of ‘Madame Mary.’ There was, of course, also Motown as well as soul in general. A great what-if is if Nyro and LaBelle had tackled, as planned, the Intruders’ ‘Cowboys to Girls’ for Gonna Take a Miracle.
Her frame of reference never tangibly shifted from the music of her youth. That was the foundation. What was built upon it all came from her. No chasing of trends, just an ongoing negotiation with her art.
I find that heroic. It’s one reason why I haven’t dwelled or even mentioned how her albums and singles charted. I don’t think it’s germane to telling why Laura Nyro is important, so hypnotic, so mesmerizing. “I’m just, I’ve always been a rebel in society. I always will be,” she once said. And, in a sense, to not discuss the numbers is to take up that rebel spirit and resist playing the easy game.
Her live recording at the Bottom Line, the most elusive of her recordings, long out of print and not included in Madfish’s 2024 boxset, has her slipping into hip middle age. When someone in the audience blows a noisemaker, she quips, “Happy New Year” even though it’s summer in the city. Later on, she notes she’s up past her bedtime—she usually got up early and was in bed by around nine o’clock in the evening.
These are snapshots of the last time Nyro toured with a full band. The group was compact: a rhythm section of Jimmy Vivino on guitar, David Wofford on bass and Frank Pagano on drums with Nydia Mata again on percussion and Diane Wilson adding dimension to Nyro’s vocal leads.
The adventurousness of the Seasons of Light group has been replaced with something more straightforward. The love is still there, both between the musicians and Nyro, and between her and her audience, but the feel is looser, a kind of reverent party.
Among the new songs Nyro debuted, the one that stuck the longest in her repertoire afterwards was the one that reassured that while she had left New York for 15 years by that point, the city never left her as it never does for those who truly love it. Now that may seem like a strange observation to make when it’s about a song called ‘The Japanese Restaurant Song’ with its set-up of a family—a rather rambunctious clan—and their meal at, you guessed it, a Japanese restaurant. Nyro had a fondness for Japan and the Far East as well as sushi and yet what I hear as she sings, “just another night, a day in the life / just another foreign film in black and white” is that street sensibility in full force and fully intact, both in the words and in the way she sings them, bending the notes, subtly teasing the time.
The sequence where she pretends to grab the attention of the restaurant’s waitress—on the Bottom Line recording, an audience member plays along, another moment of the convivial feeling caught on tape—telling her, “as you can see, the situation is still a little bit out of hand” and sharing how she had just quit smoking—true, Nyro had just kicked a 25-year habit—but, she says in the sensual way only she could, that hunger had taken over her and pretends to order, she pauses here for a long moment, “a big bowl of chocolate ice cream,” bringing the house down.
In the years that followed, as Laura Nyro returned to playing regularly solo with a small group of female harmony singers, she kept count of how many years she had been cigarette free and how since then, she remained very hungry. After the Bottom Line, she began to perform most of the song as spoken word, a reflection that ‘The Japanese Restaurant Song’ is a simple one. It opened the door for me to better understand the whole arc of Nyro’s music.
It connects everything together. She never abandoned the spark that made those early years of record making so intense, the sounds she sent out into the world and the devotion that was sent back to her from those who received them.
The Bottom Line recording also signified Nyro was moving into a new chapter. The beat became prominent. Her voice sounded more resonant and she latched onto the beat again like she used to in the early days, a by-product, no doubt, of her becoming a non-smoker. When she applied this sensibility, still earthy yet urban too, to ‘The Descent of Luna Rosé,’ her ode to waiting for her period, with clean-sounding comping from a guitar and Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums, it’s all to marvel anew at her nerve.
It was included on Walk the Dog & Light the Light, recorded and released in 1993. The front cover of the CD had a pensive portrait of Nyro. Inside the booklet was her, dressed in silks holding a portable keyboard with her left hand as if getting ready to walk to the studio with it, looking like the working musician-slash-mother she often was, touring again as frequently as she did between 1969 and 1972, yet remaining a Goddess.
If the music sounds a little bit like Steely Dan, it’s not just because it’s Purdie behind the drum kit. For the album, Nyro worked with Gary Katz, who helped steer the run of albums Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made in the seventies. There’s the nice use of a harp at the beginning of the bridge and the horn riffs that add dimension to ‘The Descent of Luna Rosé’’s percolating groove. Its refrain of “lighten up baby” is catchy as heck—again, the kind of daring that made Laura Nyro one of a kind.
There’s a sheen to Walk the Dog & Light the Light but it’s not too shiny. It situates the album’s beginning and end—both dedicated to what Nyro called “teenage primal heartbeat songs of my youth”—in the here and how while still casting a nostalgic shadow.
The eight compositions in between were collectively the strongest she had written since Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Two were older: ‘To a Child…’ had been re-recorded for a collection of lullabies released in 1992 and ‘Broken Rainbow’ had been written for the Oscar-winning documentary of the same name about the forced removal of Navajo Native Americans from Arizona in the seventies. Nyro sings the lyrics of the latter with deep feeling which, save for some spare percussion, is just her and her piano, making the injustice of the displaced acute.
‘Lite a Flame (The Animal Rights Song)’ makes a similar statement. It’s a little more on the nose but Nyro’s observation that “it’s like prejudice / for the colour of your skin / prejudice for a woman / prejudice for an animal” is hard to argue with as is the implication of the scene she sets of birds flying free, children playing in a playground while an “elephant child [is] hiding / behind a tree.”
That’s the kind of thoughtful, deep empathy Laura Nyro had. It makes Walk the Dog & Light the Light ultimately a hopeful album. ‘Louise’s Church’ is a celebration of four “kick-ass women artists”: Sappho, Billie Holiday, Frida Kahlo and Louise Nevelson. The place of worship referenced in the title is the Chapel of the Good Shepherd Nevelson sculpted for St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. Nyro chronicles the wisdom she had accumulated on the affirming ‘A Woman of the World’ and of being a working mom on the title track.
It is not surprising that the year after the album—such an energizing listen—came out was one of Nyro’s busiest and most prolific.
In 1994, she made plans with Eileen Silver-Lillywhite, a big fans of hers who worked in academia, to launch her own record label, Luna Mist Records, after she parted ways with Columbia. One of the albums she planned on releasing was of recordings made of her Christmas Eve shows in 1993 and 1994 at the Bottom Line—her way of celebrating the season was to perform her songs as well as her old favourites at the small New York club. Twenty-four performances from the two shows would be released as The Loom’s Desire, an indelible word combination from her ‘Emmie,’ in 2002.
It, along with recordings from Japan and the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco that have also been released posthumously, document the intimate ease of her shows. Often, he used a portable keyboard as opposed to a grand piano so that she could face her audience.
She would begin with her group of harmony singers whom she called the Harmonies to replicate the background she sung on her records and then she would play solo, bringing the singers back for a few more songs before performing a solo encore. She featured the recent songs she had written but selectively dipped back to those she had written, as she said, “many moons ago.” Only ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ often paired with ‘Blowin’ Away’ in a medley, would be played as it had always sounded with that instantly recognizable piano figure, sending a shiver of bliss through the body.
Like Bob Dylan, who in late 1969 sought Nyro at a New York party Clive Davis held for Janis Joplin, and Paul Simon, who appears twice in Kort’s biography in anecdotes that indicate an unexplained antipathy towards her, Laura Nyro continued to be a contemporary artist and the documents of her live in 1994 contain some of the most enjoyable moments of her captured on stage. The venues she played were usually small but what she sent out from her piano remained undiminished.
Nineteen ninety-four also saw Nyro begin recording a new album. It would be one she never got to finish.
In the summer of 1995, Laura Nyro was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Stage four. Her mother succumbed to it as did two of her relatives. She was not surprised. In Kort’s bio, her brother, Jan, says, “Laura definitely felt she was going to get it. I remember more than once when she made some dark comment about it and I scolded her about being depressing. But in the end, she was right.”
Nyro underwent a hysterectomy as well as chemotherapy and did one last recording session for her planned new album in New York in August 1995. The demos and tracks she was working on would be polished early in the millennium and released as Angel in the Dark in 2002. Some of Nyro’s closest friends and colleagues thought it shouldn’t have been released, that she wouldn’t have wanted something incomplete out in the world.
As it is, the album has almost everything that formed the fabric of Nyro’s artistry. The one thing missing are the obstacle courses that acted as a dare for the musicians that worked with her as well as for the listener to undertake the adventure of navigating through them.
Angel in the Dark does not feel like a swan song. Its vitality suggests that Nyro was in the middle of an artistic renaissance. ‘Serious Playground’ has her asserting “my boss is the muse,” that “I’m here for the music of my life” and, more pertinently, that it is “more, more than stress or strain / more, more than just capital gain.”
At another point, she sings of songwriting as “building houses” and that it is “sound architectural tools I use.”
In 1995, Nyro’s partner, Maria Desiderio, made a short film about her. It was called Musical Architecture. At the beginning, she is wearing a floral blouse and sitting on a chair that is upholstered just as florally. She quips that she hopes that it doesn’t all look “too dweeby.” But, then, with its interspersing of moments of her talking about her life and music with snippets of her recordings and stills of her focusing on her halcyon days in New York, Musical Architecture does feel like the valedictory it was intended to be.
The most subtle sign of her ongoing treatment for cancer is the wig she is wearing which mirrors her hair in the nineties. She notes her age, 47, and that “it’s been quite a life.” She also lays out her philosophy of songwriting. “I use everything,” she says softly, “Feminism, my spirituality, motherhood. You use your intelligence, you’re using an important part of your being. You just have to work every single day.” At another point, she compares singing to flying.
The film concludes with Nyro at the piano singing ‘Angel in the Dark.’ When she gets to the bridge, she notes it still needs work. She look at the camera to assure that she will complete it.
In early 1996, Laura Nyro’s cancer was in remission. Six months later, it was back. The prognosis was grim. If she undertook another round of chemotherapy, she may have had 18 months to live. Without it, she would likely have six. Not willing to undergo more chemo, she tried alternative medicines and treatments. True to her nature, she kept her health battle relatively private, dealing with it stoically. It was during this time that she worked on selecting the recordings for the two-CD collection Columbia wanted to release anthologizing her music.
At a memorial concert held at the Beacon Theatre in New York six-and-a-half months after she passed and organized by Desiderio who herself would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer soon afterwards and who passed away in 1999, a group of her musical colleagues and musicians influenced by her gathered to pay tribute. Among them was singer Kenny Rankin who met Nyro in 1966. He spoke of a time when he felt about as low as ever felt. He called her and she asked him to come to her apartment. They talked, she made him tea and she cradled him in her arms so he could cry out his pain. He noted at that moment that he was the Billy in ‘Billy’s Blues,’ one of the countless high points from More Than a New Discovery. He then offered a deeply felt rendition of the song to memorialize her whom he called “incredible” and “salt of the earth.”
Fourteen years earlier, they had recorded a duet of a song written by Nyro’s brother, Jan, called ‘Polonaise.’ A few promotional copies were pressed as a single before the record label it was on, PCM Records, went bankrupt. A few enterprising YouTubers have uploaded the recording.
‘Polonaise’ is the rarest Laura Nyro record. It’s a soft ballad with lyrics that seem to luxuriate in timelessness. The pairing of Rankin’s poetic phrasing with Nyro’s soulful replies cushioned upon Richard Tee’s lustrous electric piano is a fever dream of sublimity. She sings with the expressive range that she had long ago dialed back. It’s one of her most ravishing performances. To hear it is to swoon and since first hearing it just a few days ago, I can’t stop thinking about it or wanting to hear it once again.
But, that’s how it goes when you continually punch your membership card to Laura Nyro fandom. Call it obsession, call it infatuation, call me a Nyromaniac. I’ll take any or all of these labels. In the weeks that I have spent writing this essay, I’ve been deeper into her vortex than I have ever been. The playlist I have been building on Spotify of her music, the music that influenced her, recordings that operate in the same territory as her and the sounds created by the legion influenced by her tops ninety hours and has over 1,400 pieces of music. It has been a constant soundtrack as have been her albums in my record room.
I crave variety in my listening but this constancy has made me feel happier, more balanced and more at ease than I have been in a long time. My mental health is better too. I have latched onto some of the Zen she mentions in ‘The Japanese Restaurant Song.’ But, that’s also how it goes when you let the music of Laura Nyro into your life.
My wife bought me a decal of her that includes a portrait of her taken when she visited Buffy Sainte-Marie’s home in 1969. It now has pride of place on my laptop. I also bought a T-shirt with the advertisement of her show at the San Diego Community Concourse Convention Hall in December 1970 with Jackson Browne opening. It includes a photo taken by Columbia’s Bob Cato during the shoot for the cover of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.
I’ve worn it twice, once on a day I headed into the office of my day job, something I do once or twice a month. You never know with such things, someone may recognize whoever or whatever is on a graphic tee and you may chat for a moment or more or you’ll never hear a peep. I wore a cardigan over it—I don’t like feeling cold and have gotten increasingly iffy about exposed arms—but I made sure it was open enough so that it was clear who I was repping.
How I wanted someone to recognize Nyro so we could trade that knowing look that would say all that would possibly need to be said. How I longed even more to be asked, “Laura Nyro? Who is she?” or something similar, the warm-up for me to offer my evangel. To tell of the finest singer-songwriter who ever was, to say that you may know her songs and here I am to tell you of who wrote them, who designed them out of her head, who recorded them and who made music better that I could ever possibly fathom, who knocked me out the first time I heard ‘Eli’s Comin’’ and twenty-two-and-a-half years later, still knocks me out when I hear it and to recommend the next time he, she or they fire up their streaming service of choice to type up Laura Nyro, press play and be prepared to enter the vortex where I have been, to kiss goodbye to the before time and to kiss hello to the after time. I wouldn’t be offering music discovery, I would be offering a lifeline to salvation. If I believe anything, this is one of my beliefs.
I think of seven days before my first true exposure to Laura Nyro’s music and recall the night I spent at the Blue Note in New York. Playing was an all-star band to toast Dizzy Gillespie. The front line was jazz’s version of murderers’ row: Roy Hargrove, Jon Faddis, James Moody and Slide Hampton plus Clark Terry joining in on a few numbers. The rhythm section was Dennis Mackrel on drums, a bassist whose name I don’t recall and on piano was Billy Childs, a long-time fan of Laura Nyro.
That night as the band offered up contemporary bebop—I especially remember a blazing version of ‘Manteca’ that opened the second set—I doubt Childs was thinking about her but he knew, he had the secret, he had gotten the goods.
In 2014, he worked with Larry Klein, a bassist and songwriter, to create Map to the Treasure: Laura Nyro Reimagined with a cast of singers and guest musicians. It remains the pearl of the many tribute albums made of her.
Childs recently said of her: “I discovered through listening to her lyrics and just checking out her entire body of work that she was a profoundly deep composer and conceptualist.” He added: “I had vivid conceptions of all of those songs so it made reimagining it not difficult for me.”
Childs’ charts explore the complexity and depth of her compositions, using them as springboards to offer the intricate, layered and opulent shrine in sound deserving of Laura Nyro. It is, for lack of a better adjective, a beautiful record, eliciting awe at how he, with Susan Tedeshi and altoist Steve Wilson, matches her fervour on ‘Gibsom Street’ and doing the same with Lisa Fischer on ‘Map to the Treasure.’ Rickie Lee Jones pokes at the rawness of Nyro’s tale of addiction ‘Been on a Train’ with Chris Potter on tenor saxophone, and Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter deepen the aura of ‘Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp.’
Tears are close by as Childs features Chris Botti’s trumpet prior to Shawn Colvin’s tender reading of ‘Save the Country’ followed by a flute choir ushering in Dianne Reeves on ‘To a Child….’ It’s an album that impresses me and sweeps me up more each time I listen.
As with anything to do with Laura Nyro, nothing less than one’s A game will do. A tribute like the one Elton John and Brandi Carlile created to open their 2025 collaboration, by comparison, falls short of its target. ‘The Rose of Laura Nyro’ relies on name-dropping as many of her songs as possible.
It’s not that they didn’t have good intentions, it just doesn’t feel like Nyro or her music or at least it doesn’t to me. Singer Mary Brown’s ‘Laura Nyro Passed Away Today’ falls into a similar trap. It does, however, offer this image: “fly through the sky / soar past the stars / bring back the child to be born who will carry on,” that envisions Nyro out there amongst us and above us, still working her magic. And then there’s Tennis’ ‘Mean Streets’ which tells of her as a teen in the Bronx on the streets and of her summers in the Catskills.
It comes as no shock that her father, Louis Nigro, named Laura after the theme David Raskin wrote for Laura, Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the novel by Vera Caspary. It is a haunting piece of music, complex and beyond the garden variety. It sticks after it is heard.
These things come to mind when I turn to a recording of Laura’s that isn’t much celebrated. It’s ‘Art of Love’ from Walk the Dog & Light the Light. I love it. It’s one of my favourites. The message is focused on love and of wishing a happy holiday, a salutation that is given not to be unoffensive but in recognition of the universal meaning of the word, that each individual celebrates something or someone in their own way. Nyro asks “sister / brother / are we born / to learn the art of love?” with her adding a thick vibrato on the last word. When she wishes “happy holiday,” she pauses before adding and drawing out “with love.”
One may say that what she is doing here is doing what she had promised to never do again. She’s socking it to the people. There are no surprises, no mysteries to decipher, just a sincere, heartfelt message. That’s OK. More often that not, I believe those who receive it and like it will come to Laura Nyro.