(1968) Eli and the Thirteenth Confession

Laura Nyro

ReleasedMarch 3, 1968

LabelColumbia Records

RecordedJanuary – February 1968

ProducerLaura Nyro and Charlie Calello

StudioCBS 30th Street Studio

Genres

Primary

Pop soulSinger-songwriterProgressive soul

Secondary

Brill BuildingJazz popVocal jazzSunshine popArt pop

Scene

New York City

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Tracks46:15

Side one20:07

1	Luckie	3:00
2	Lu	2:44
3	Sweet Blindness	2:37
4	Poverty Train	4:16
5	Lonely Women	3:32
6	Eli's Comin'	3:58

Side two26:08

1	Timer	3:22
2	Stoned Soul Picnic	3:47
3	Emmie	4:20
4	Woman's Blues	3:46
5	Once It Was Alright Now (Farmer Joe)	2:58
6	December's Boudoir	5:05
7	The Confession	2:50

Laura Nyro’s piano on “Luckie” detonates the song from the first bar: percussive chords, harmonically dense, landing with the force of someone treating the keyboard as a drum kit and a confessional simultaneously. Within thirty seconds the track has shifted tempo twice, passed through a key change that arrives like inclement weather, and established a vocal presence — Nyro’s voice leaping from a murmur to a full-throated gospel shout within a single phrase — that nothing in pop had prepared anyone for in 1968. Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is where the Brill Building tradition fused with gospel fervor, jazz harmony, and confessional urgency to produce something that had no precedent and has had few real successors. Every song is structurally ambitious in ways that should feel academic but never do, because the sophistication exists entirely in service of emotional force, and the emotional force is overwhelming.

The making

Nyro was twenty when she made it, and she came to Columbia already burned once. Her debut, More Than a New Discovery (Verve Folkways, 1967), had been released against her wishes in arrangements she disowned; David Geffen — Nyro was the first management client of his career — bought her out of the Verve deal and steered her toward a label that would let her produce herself. The label president Clive Davis signed her after an audition where she turned off every light except the television beside her piano¹ and played him the songs that became this record. Davis committed Columbia to full orchestral arrangements behind a writer almost nobody had heard of.

The sessions ran across January and February 1968 at CBS 30th Street Studio, the converted Manhattan church where Miles Davis had cut² Kind of Blue and whose fifty-foot ceiling gave the room a natural reverb prized across jazz and classical recording. Recording in New York, away from the Los Angeles studios of her West Coast peers, rooted the album in the city’s session-and-jazz culture, and the players reflect it: Chuck Rainey and Chet Amsterdam on bass, Hugh McCracken on electric guitar, Artie Schroeck and Buddy Saltzman on drums, and a horn section that included tenor heavyweights Zoot Sims and Joe Farrell³. Nyro is credited with piano, vocal, and harmonies, and, in the album’s own language, as witness to the confession.

Charlie Calello, the arranger and co-producer, had charted more than a hundred Billboard hits for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and would later work with Streisand and Neil Diamond⁴. His role here was famously self-effacing: by his own account the job was to stay out of Nyro’s way. “Laura was not someone who copied people,” he said. “She was original in every sense of the word⁵.” The contrast with Brian Wilson at work on Pet Sounds (1966) is instructive — where Wilson commanded the Wrecking Crew as an auteur-arranger writing every part himself, Nyro arrived with songs so harmonically and rhythmically complete that a veteran hit-maker deferred to them. The auteurship lived in the writing and the piano attack. Even the packaging carried the album’s logic into the physical object: Nyro wanted the record to smell of lilacs, and Geffen persuaded Columbia to print the fold-out lyric sheet, itself unusual in 1968, in perfume-scented ink⁶.

What it inherits and what it introduces

The album inherits the melodic and harmonic sophistication of the Brill Building — Nyro was a published songwriter within that system before she was a performer — and the emotional directness of soul and gospel music. What it introduces is a model for the female songwriter-performer as a formally ambitious, genre-blending artist, collapsing the songwriter-performer divide while expanding the scope of what a pop soul record could contain. In 1968 this was radical: neither the singer-songwriter movement nor progressive rock had fully coalesced, and Nyro anticipated both. She was writing songs complex enough to sustain jazz-level harmonic analysis and performing them with an intensity that made the complexity feel like urgency. The gap between what the songs demanded of a listener and what the pop market was prepared to reward would define her career.

The genre-mixing is alchemical. The songs draw on the girl group tradition, soul, vocal jazz, show tunes, gospel, and the blues, often within a single track, and the arrangements layer strings, horns, piano, and rhythm section into a sound that is dense but transparent — closer to Burt Bacharach’s clarity than to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, animated by a rhythmic charge that owes more to gospel and R&B than to either. Nyro’s piano is the foundation, percussive and harmonically restless, an anchor the band is built around while the vocals ride on top. The roots are not affectation: she grew up singing doo-wop on Bronx street corners with a jazz-trumpeter father and a classical-loving mother, and the gospel shout and the close-harmony stacks are her native languages.

Close readings

The album is built as continuous emotional weather. Tempos and keys modulate within and across songs, and side breaks feel like brief pauses inside one continuous flow, so the catchy songs land as moments of release within a longer, restless argument. “Sweet Blindness” is the clearest case of that release — a wine-soaked romp whose girl-group chorus rides careening rhythms and whose apparent simplicity hides a layered arrangement. “Stoned Soul Picnic” opens the second side on a rhythm that could be Motown heard through a psychedelic haze, carrying Nyro’s invented word surry (“come on the surry down”), a contraction of “let’s hurry” she said had no meaning but sounded nice — private vocabulary printed on a perfumed sheet.

Against those, the difficult songs show the full reach of her range. “Poverty Train” is often named her finest vocal on the record, a harrowing drug-and-poverty narrative built on bluesy, jangling guitar where she wails every line into the gospel-belt extreme of a three-octave instrument. “Emmie” sits at the opposite pole, a swelling four-minute ballad with one of her tenderest melodies, long read in later criticism as an oblique love song to a woman. “Timer” and the closing “December’s Boudoir” are the album’s most overt structural restlessness, time signatures shifting just when the ear thinks it has found the pattern, a roller-coaster form that the lush instrumentation never quite tames. “Eli’s Comin’” closes the first side with a menace bordering on rock, its shifting tempos framing Eli as both irresistible temptation and unavoidable trap.

Reception and the cover paradox

The album was a commercial under-performer. It reached only the lower stretches of the Billboard 200 — sources place the peak around No. 181 in September 1968⁷ — with no hit single of Nyro’s own. Critical attention ran the other way. The most cited contemporary verdict belongs to Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau, who had first written Nyro off and, forced by a friend to listen again, reversed himself completely, calling her an “original and brilliant young talent⁸.” That arc of initial bafflement giving way to evangelism on repeat listening became the template for the album’s whole critical afterlife.

Its real commercial life arrived through other singers. The 5th Dimension, produced by Bones Howe, took “Stoned Soul Picnic” to No. 3 on the Hot 100 (No. 2 R&B) and “Sweet Blindness” to No. 13⁹, and Three Dog Night carried “Eli’s Comin’” to No. 10 in 1969¹⁰. Each cover outsold the original. The covers cut the songs down to their pop chassis — the 5th Dimension versions are sunnier and more even-keeled — which is exactly why Alice Cooper’s later verdict lands: “Many people had hits with her songs. But her versions were always better¹¹.” Nyro’s originals keep the harmonic and rhythmic friction the covers iron out. The irony was pointed: the songwriter-performer divide she was trying to collapse reasserted itself through the market, which valued her songs but couldn’t find a wide audience for the woman singing them.

Influence and legacy

The covers became the engine of other careers. By November 1969, three different Nyro songs sat in the Billboard Top 10 at once, though only one was from Eli — “Wedding Bell Blues” (the 5th Dimension’s No. 1), “And When I Die” (Blood, Sweat & Tears’ No. 2), and “Stoney End” (Barbra Streisand’s No. 6 a year later) all came from her 1967 debut, not from this record.¹² What matters is the pattern: Nyro’s songs became standards while her own albums stayed cult objects.

Her influence on artists runs deeper than her chart profile suggests. Todd Rundgren described hearing Eli as a shock on the order of first hearing the Beatles — “It was such a complete vision” — and absorbed her fusion of pop craft and soul energy into his own genre-dissolving work¹³. Joni Mitchell has cited her as formative; Elton John and Kate Bush inherited her audacious rhythmic shifts; Tori Amos and Fiona Apple inherited her model of the piano as an instrument of emotional extremity. Stevie Wonder’s early-seventies albums move in a parallel direction, collapsing genre boundaries under the pressure of personal expression. The through line is specific: the female songwriter-performer working at a level of formal ambition that the industry’s existing categories could not accommodate.

Recognition came slowly and late. Nyro entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010 and, posthumously, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, inducted by Bette Midler¹⁴; she had died of ovarian cancer in 1997 at forty-nine. The album endures as a touchstone despite its low original sales, a fixture on canonical lists and a record that Rolling Stone still calls her masterpiece while noting how severely underappreciated she remains. It also stands as proof that the Brill Building tradition didn’t end when the British Invasion made professional songwriters seem obsolete. It evolved, and in Nyro’s hands it evolved into something the cubicles could never have contained: music where craft and confession are the same act, where the sophistication is what makes the personal legible.

MAP

Explorer

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession

The making

What it inherits and what it introduces

Close readings

Reception and the cover paradox

Influence and legacy

See also

MAP

Explorer

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession

The making

What it inherits and what it introduces

Close readings

Reception and the cover paradox

Influence and legacy

See also

Footnotes