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Laura Nyro - December's Boudoir Epic! Why is Eli And The Thirteenth Confession such a masterpiece?
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Very underrated writer.
An take on a few folks she's influenced:
A Conversation with Todd Rundgren (continued) PM: I once interviewed Becker & Fagen [Steely Dan], and they talked about how their approach to chord voicings and harmony was influenced by Laura Nyro. I know you've said you were influenced by her too. What kinds of things about her writing affected you most? TR: I think there is that more sophisticated R & B thing or the Burt Bacharach side of pop music that involves not just chords that are richer, major and minor sevenths and suspensions and things like that, but the sort of melodic movement and the classical counterpoint elements--that's one of the things that attracted me. But I know for a fact that her influences were the more sophisticated side of R & B, like Jerry Ragovoy and Mann & Weil and Carole King. That is Laura Nyro's lineage. She was a source for that, in a sense, and she also had her own very original and very jazz-influenced way of seeing things. It was that extra layer that made her influential. A lot of those chords she got from other people. But beyond the elements of her composition, I always thought it was the way she played her own material that really sold it. Nobody ever did a cover version of a Laura Nyro song that was as good as her original version. As time went on, she got into this more introspective, less blatantly emotional approach to music and I sort of lost interest in her after that. It wasn't as if she didn't still have all those elements of her songwriting in there. I just don't think she was selling it in the same way. PM: Did you know her? TR: I knew her fairly well. I met her right after Eli & The Thirteenth Confession. I actually had arranged a meeting, just because I was so infatuated with her and I wanted to meet the person who had produced all this music. We got along, and we were kind of friendly, and actually, after I met her the first time, she asked me if I wanted to be her band leader. But The Nazz had just signed a record contract and I couldn't skip out on the band, even though it was incredibly tempting. Years later, she was having trouble getting into the groove on an album called Mother Spiritual. She had worked with a lot of the old people like Roy Hallee who had helped her get Eli & The Thirteenth Confession recorded. She just wasn't making progress. She was stumped. And we had never worked in the studio together before, but for the purposes of getting her project completed, it worked. I managed to get her into the room and get all the songs recorded. After that, I couldn't really stick around for the mixing part. The pace at which she worked was so slow that I couldn't stick for the duration. But I did get to work with her and knew her for a good period of her professional life.
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I was not very familiar with her (had only heard her name) until I saw a conversation about her between Elvis Costello & Elton John.
I tried to buy Eli, but it was not in the store My Legacy
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A few familiar covers. "Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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