Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the last Random Weekend selection on Meet Me in Montauk. Starting next week, I will introduce a new series titled Throwback Weekends.
Suggested by daily commenter Dana (I’ve decided to retire the “frequent commenter” label for Dana to better acknowledge his contributions here), this series will look back at the top hits of decades past on the same weekend through history.
Here’s a great song written by Laura Nyro and featured on her classic album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession but turned into a hit by 5th Dimension.
Nyro wrote a ton of songs that became hits for other people but never received the acclaim she deserved as a performer in her own right. I own only this one album and it’s a knockout.
Laura Nyro was not only ahead of her own time (late 60s and early 70s), but pretty much every time after that as well. This is some crazy shit.
Nyro has a knack for writing 4-minute songs that feel more like 45 minutes. I mean that in both a good and bad way. She is a master of shifts in both tone and time signature, throwing left-field change-ups into every song, which certainly makes for interesting listening, though it can also be a bit exhausting. This certainly isn’t Sunday morning chill-out music.
I’d never heard of Laura Nyro until about a year ago. She’s another of those influential and mega-talented artists who faded into obscurity because they never achieved much commercial popularity. Some of her songs were big hits, but always for other people.
It seems Nyro was something of a savant when it came to songwriting. She was just 20 years old when she released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, the groundbreaking album that features this song. She leaped between keys and time signatures within her songs in a way not done very often before or since.
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