A Year of Blind Spots: Eli and the Thirteenth Confession

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession

Laura Nyro

1968

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Eli and the Thirteenth Confession by Laura Nyro:

Considering her "idiosyncratic" performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival (she was booed off stage after a soul-style revue), and her underachievement in the sales charts, singer-songwriter Laura Nyro is all too frequently passed over as an original artist of worth. Eli and the Thirteenth Confession deserves better.

Recorded under the aegis of David Geffen, these piano-based songs are introspective, sensual, and poetic offerings, embracing an eclectic combination of blue-eyed soul, jazz (Nyro's father had been a jazz trumpeter), folk music, and gospel. Her openness to experimentation saw Nyro incorporate unexpected tempo shifts, something that irked contemporary critics. But whether it is the bohemian life depicted in her swinging "Sweet Blindness," the wandering and sunny soul-wrapped melody of "Stoned Soul Picnic," or the sad and lingering blues of "Woman's Blues," Nyro's intense, unconventional songwriting—and striking delivery, ranging from whispering to strident within a phrase—touches both the head and the heart.

The album barely hit the Top 200, but though Nyro herself remained a stranger to chart success, well-known acts such as Fifth Dimension and Three Dog Night made the big time with cover versions of tracks herein. This album was to be Nyro's spiritual legacy to many female musicians who became icons after her, including Janis Ian, Phoebe Snow, and Tori Amos.

What Joe has to say about Eli and the Thirteenth Confession by Laura Nyro:

Here we go with another album that appears to be more influential than great in and of itself. Which is fine! I'm not out here searching for the all-time greats, I'm just trying to get a sense of the chronology of music history, and so I'm going to run across a lot of "really influential" albums in this column. It totally makes sense, when you think about it—the much-heralded albums of history wouldn't be Blind Spots at this point in my life. I'm digging a little deeper than that.

It's interesting that 1001 Albums implies two race signifiers without actually stating Nyro's whiteness outright. First, the three female artists listed as having been influenced greatly by Laura Nyro are all white. Second, the book uses the much-maligned (on this blog, at least) genre signifier "blue-eyed soul," which, as far as I can tell, means "soul music for white people." Which is fucking insane, but so it goes with music created in the same decade that the Civil Rights Act was passed. Based on sound alone, I would've assumed that this music would have fit in with the acts featured on Summer of Soul, but no, she's white. White enough to get booed when singing ostensibly "Black" soul music at Monterey. What I'm trying to say here, I think, is that I'm thankful that I don't have to worry about race when it comes to good music, and I get uncomfortable thinking about those decades in American history when you did have to think about that while listening. It's fucked up. Can we please not use "blue-eyed soul" anymore?

I'm surprised that Carole King isn't mentioned in the blurb, since she was another singer-songwriter at the time who released her own debut albums a couple years after Eli, and so probably was influenced at least a little bit by this. I'm not familiar with King beyond the many hundreds of spins that Tapestry has gotten in this household when I'm not in charge of the music, I'm again just going on sound alone. It's R&B/folk-hybrid pop music that might now be considered "adult contemporary." Which is weird, because there are heavy psychedelic overtones on this album—what else could "Stoned" in the title of the album's most well-known song mean? 

I had never heard of Laura Nyro (pronounced "NEE-ro," by the way) before Allison chose a song for YSC (she was right on two counts: this is probably not folk music; a sinkhole in front of your house is just a shade more interesting than this album). Not sure how it slipped through the cracks at the time (probably because I was inundated with emo albums from the next prompt), but I'm glad I recognized it when I saw it in the book. The whole '60s singer-songwriter pop soul thing is something that I can get behind in theory, but end up not necessarily loving when I hear it. Like, these are great songs, impeccably written. But contemporary critics were right—did she have to slow down the songs in the middle of a phrase? Doesn't it seem like she's kinda overdoing it with the vocals? I can't be the only one with this opinion, since the fucking 5th Dimension was able to take her songs higher in the charts than she would. I bet they weren't slowing that shit down. (And leave it to Three Dog Night to steal the album's best song and ride those coattails.)

In the end, I reach the same conclusion that I often do with albums labeled "more influential than you realize": I really like it, I appreciate it, I don't love it, I don't see myself proclaiming its worth from the mountaintops or anything like that. But I like it, and I'm glad I know it.