#Laura Nyro #blue-eyed soul #R&B #piano rock #jazz rock #folk rock #alternative pop #singer-songwriter #1960s #1970s
Whatever role Laura Nyro chose to play - earth mother, soul sister, angel of the Bronx subways - she committed to it. With a soaring, open-hearted voice and ingeniously crafted compositions, Nyro transformed a range of influences into her own kind of art song. She made vertiginous shifts from hushed reveries to ecstatic gospel-driven shout-ups with an intensity and a courage that, as Elton John would point out, left its mark on many contemporaries who achieved greater commercial success. As the music of the 1960s reached a climax, no one else merged the new songwriting freedoms pioneered by Bob Dylan with the pop sensibility of the Brill Building tunesmiths to such intriguing effect. As a teenager, she wrote And When I Die and Stoney End, songs that became hits for other artists. Her own enigmatically titled albums - Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, New York Tendaberry, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat - showed a precociously sophisticated sensibility. Later, rejecting commercial pressures, she would help push the boundaries of popular music by writing songs celebrating motherhood, female sexuality and her menstrual cycle. In the hearts of admirers, she kindled a loyalty fierce enough to withstand the semi-obscurity into which she had fallen by the time of her death from ovarian cancer in 1997, at 49. The dimming of her fame had been gradual and, to an extent, self-actuated. If her early songs seemed to give listeners the thrill of overhearing her innermost thoughts, she lived her adult life edging towards the spotlight before withdrawing to cope with personal upheavals, then re-emerging years later with songs that confounded expectations by explicitly affirming new commitments to radical feminism, animal rights and environmental activism. From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/27/laura-nyro-the-phenomenal-singers-singer-the-60s-overlooked
surrey on
go somewhere, travel (from the ancient song 'surrey down to the stoned soul picnic', written by laura nyro (R.I.P.) and performed by the insipid 5th dimension)
a surrey is a 4-wheeled 2-seated horse-drawn carriage
lets' surrey on down to the bluntsman's and procure some 'goodness'
i'm going to surrey on over to jane's for a 'taste'
From: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=surrey%20on
