New York Tendaberry

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.

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.

The closest thing to a traditional Nyro song was “Time and Love,” although even that one takes efforts to place the surrounding tales of love and loss and junkies and traitors on a larger, spiritual timeline. In the verses, each sentence is prefaced with an introductory “so,” as if presenting the evidence to help reach a conclusion: “So Jesus was an angel and mankind broke his wing,” begins the final verse. “Nothing cures like time and love,” she offers in the chorus, a line that other artists might use to cushion the blows of heartache but Nyro instead positions as the teaching of a kind of Newer Testament, framing her stories as both ancient and distinctly of her time.

It was wise of Columbia to issue “Save the Country” as a single prior to her completion of the album, shortly after she wrote it in response to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Condensed to a two-minute runtime, it can be heard as a very 1968 assessment of the cultural landscape, a state-of-the-union that was played hourly on Los Angeles radio, had all the lyrics printed as a full-page ad in the press, and would receive marketable covers from the Fifth Dimension and Paul Revere & the Raiders. But with its extended outro on New York Tendaberry, the song takes on a more complicated meaning. As its chorus is repeated, increasingly frantic and ragged, she seems to embody the exhaustion of the political moment, questioning whether her transmissions could make a difference in such a loud, violent world. Who is she praying to? Who is listening?

Nyro brought several innovations to pop music, and one was her blending of message and medium: quoting other songwriters, interpolating folk standards and gospel hymns, swerving between genre and tone like a restless hand at the radio dial, all in an effort to elevate her chosen medium to something that felt eternal. There’s a reason why her fans included songwriting visionaries like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell alongside jazz luminaries like Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane; why Barbra Streisand could record three cover songs on one album and Bette Midler could give her one of the Rock Hall’s most personal, emotionally charged induction speeches: “In a world full of imitators—fake it ’til you make it—she was a complete original…. Someone who embodied what everyone in our line of work would be if we only had the guts,” she said through tears.

Growing up as a self-conscious kid in a bustling big city, Nyro learned to summon that confidence from within. The atmosphere she constructs on New York Tendaberry—bold, strange, impervious to outside influence but acutely aware of her surroundings—is one she had been studying her whole life. “Ever since I was a very little girl I’ve created my own world,” she told Melody Maker in 1976. “Of music, in my room, with my piano, from when I was maybe 5 years old.”

This was the environment she attempted to rebuild in the studio. After the concessions she had made with the label on her previous two records—session musicians, singles, arrangements where she didn’t even play her own piano parts—this time she embraced a process that suited only her. Lit by candlelight, with Halee behind the boards, she would sit at the piano and record everything that flowed through her psyche, fragments of melody lines and unarranged poetry. Then, when the tape ran out, she’d go through those recordings and piece things together until she saw a larger picture starting to emerge.

Akin to the way we can process our memories, anxieties, and desires through the logic of our dreams, Nyro’s songwriting rummaged through a lifetime and prismed into a musical language of her own. This reflected her own experience as a listener. As a teenager, she would sneak into her bedroom to drink cough syrup and play jazz records, entranced with the way Miles Davis and John Coltrane could conjure complex emotions that only existed for the length of their performance, beyond the reaches of language.

She never lost this childlike wonder about the possibilities of music. In Peter Doggett’s liner notes for American Dreamer—one of many posthumous compilations released after Nyro’s death from ovarian cancer in 1997—there’s an endearing story of Nyro meeting Bob Dylan at a party, where he attempts to make casual conversation and Nyro can’t fight the nerves to engage. (I love imagining Dylan having to be the sociable one.) In 1971, she bottled her giddy enthusiasm on Gonna Take a Miracle, a tribute to the girl groups she adored as a kid—it’s a record that still bursts from the speakers with joy.

Her songwriting is where Nyro made her most lasting paeans to the miracle of art and observer, the meaning we find when the right thing reaches us at the right time. And just as her compositions were built from shattered pieces that only she could align so gracefully—listen how the stark, slow-burning opener “You Don’t Love Me When I Cry” still makes room for chimes, acoustic guitar, woodwind, strings, and harp—she sometimes invented her own vocabulary to express her feelings, a lexicon of onomatopoeic portmanteaus and suggestive half-words like “springblown” and “surry” and the third word in the album title. Within the title track, “tendaberry” becomes an encouraging pet name for her hometown—a word whose ripe association and, possibly, echoic similarity to “sanctuary,” leads her to this conclusion: “You look like a city/But you feel like religion to me.”

Few artists conjure the sound of a city quite like Nyro in the early days. You can hear it when she leads a full band, used sparingly here, as in the clattering entrance three minutes into “Gibsom Street.” But you can also hear it in the quiet: the way the piano motif in “Captain for Dark Mornings” quickens and ascends the scale like a steady walk in the early morning, gathering momentum as the rest of the world wakes up. The sense of place flows through the lyric sheet, too, capturing the “drawn blind blues” and “gutters in stacks.” If New York is a religion here, it is one whose practice requires deep focus and solitude.

“If you put my music in the wrong place, it becomes a freak,” Nyro said in 1969. Even by this point in her burgeoning career, this observation came from harsh experience: pivotal live performances for inattentive audiences, opening sets for unrelated artists, increasingly unsympathetic receptions in the press. It was not uncommon for Nyro to be characterized as difficult, pretentious, and flighty, and that’s when they weren’t just outright decrying her physical appearance or dismissing her art wholesale.

By the time she became comfortable performing live again during the ’70s, she had amassed a devoted cult following through her increasingly sporadic, ambitious releases and the inscrutable windows they offered into her personal life; her shows often paused when fans interrupted her from the crowd or came on stage to make physical contact. It got weird. A major part of her narrative post-Tendaberry is a retreat from a music industry that never quite suited her. “There are a lot of things that go against me. First of all, the rhythm of me, of my body, is more gentle than the crash-bang trip of the music business,” she said in her Melody Maker interview. By the end of her life, she had sharpened her disdain, telling MOJO: “It was then, and still is, a capitalist industry that thrives on formula…. I knew I had to fight for my freedom and grow in a creative/poetic way rather than using a formula.”

This last point remains the defining insight of Nyro’s career, and this is the path she laid out with the abstract balladry of Tendaberry. Even at the time, she was aware this music wouldn’t reach the same ears as her pop songs, the music that turned into “ice cream soda” in the hands of her more commercial contemporaries. New York Tendaberry, she imagined, would be a harder sell. “It is not an obvious one,” she told an early interviewer, “not one that you really even listen to, because it really goes past your ears and it’s very sensory and it’s all feel.” All feel. From a young artist learning that everything she owned could and would be sold—her words, her music, her voice, her story—here she was with the one thing she knew was hers alone. And like anything worth feeling, it takes a little time, and a lot of surrender.