The first album was for the industry: More Than a New Discovery was the songbook that introduced Laura Nyro as a writer so original and suited for pop radio in the late 1960s that, for a wide array of artists, covering her songs all but guaranteed them a hit record. The second album was the masterpiece: Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was a dazzlingly prodigious statement that upgraded the then-20-year-artist from a behind-the-scenes hitmaker into a pop auteur. The packaging was unique for the time—cover art with no text, liner notes proudly displaying all the lyrics and thus welcoming comparisons to Sgt. Pepper’s—and the music overflowed with vision, meaning, and symphonic drama.
The third album was just for herself. New York Tendaberry, released in the fall of 1969, mostly consists of Nyro alone at the piano, delivering songs that eschewed and subverted most of the characteristics that had won her attention and adoration throughout the preceding decade. Unlike her first album, the compositions rarely built toward pop choruses or easy, identifiable emotion. And unlike her second album, this music didn’t aim to overwhelm. To some of her collaborators, the songs didn’t even sound finished—just some loose fragments she seemed to be making up on the spot.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Despite its critical acclaim, enormous influence, and singular legacy within singer-songwriter music, I’m not sure anyone can ever fully understand New York Tendaberry besides Nyro. Self-produced alongside her engineer Roy Halee, it sounds at times like an avant-garde one-woman show; at others, like an old-school girl group communing with a Ouija board; occasionally, it’s Christmas Mass in an abandoned tenement building. The average song length is around four minutes, and each one covers so much ground, changes direction so suddenly, and welcomes so many lyrical interpretations, that each of them can feel like the centerpiece, the moment where the central action takes place.
Death and the devil dominate the writing, and Nyro would later attribute this darkness to a fascination from her precocious young adulthood. “I think my earlier work, a lot of it, is very intense, and it’s almost seeking to understand the sorrow,” she said the following decade. The word “understand” is important here, in that Nyro isn’t simply describing or expressing sorrow but offering a circuitous path toward the feeling itself. It’s what allows a song like “Tom Cat Goodbye”—which one could interpret as a rush of conflicting emotions after learning your partner has been unfaithful—to shift dramatically between its haunted, spacious verses, a cartoonishly murderous response to “Frankie and Johnny” in the chorus, and a closing refrain that ends with a bone-chilling scream, one of several on the record.
The material invites total immersion. Nyro had already flirted with the idea of including perfumes in her record packaging to help transport listeners, and she preferred instructing her accompanists in painterly, abstract directions instead of sheet music so that they could provide the right feeling, not just the notes. The production shows the effects of this process. Jimmy Haskell’s string arrangements come and go like summer storms; in “Mercy on Broadway,” a gunshot blasts in the background to no particular response. Even Nyro’s piano playing seems to shift in and out of focus, drawing our attention to the pregnant pause of a note fading in a quiet room.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
