Running on Streets of Delight: Fresh Ears on "Eli and the Thirteenth Confession"
As with her peer Joni Mitchell, I got into the otherwise peerless Laura Nyro too late to consider her formative, and though I've blogged admiringly about her in this space twice before, I haven't done a deep-dive listen to any of her 10 records, all of which I have somewhere in my music library, just waiting for (re)consideration.
A Fresh Ears™ visit to her second album, 1968's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, gives me some inkling why I haven't scaled this mountain before: This record is a lot. Apart from its two hit singles, "Sweet Blindness" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" (which can be heard as two versions of essentially the same song—they're even in the same key), every single song on this album is a hot mess of seemingly improvised yet fully orchestrated tempo, chord, and feel changes. Start to finish it is a disorienting, exhilarating ride which, I confess, I have often had to take breaks from.
Nyro roars out of the gate with the full band and what sounds like the end of a chorus: "Yes, I'm ready!" And then, in what will be one of the album's signature moves, she stops cold for a languid vocal pickup into a shuffling groove and drops this bombshell (these weirdly syntaxed lyrics are exactly as sung, sans typos):
Listen also for the slightly unhinged refrain that flares up at 2:00, in the midst of what otherwise seems like a playful answer song to the murderous "Hey Joe," as she wails, "Fire, flames of gold rush my mind." It's just one of a multitude of apparent drug references that pervade the record, both metaphorical and literal (the "sweet cocaine" longueur of "Poverty Train," which is really about something "better than" cocaine, i.e., heroin).
So are drugs the reason Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is such a wild, teeming carousel? You could just as easily attribute it to sexual intoxication: Dirty jokes about potatoes aside, the record is starkly frank about lust, both thwarted and fulfilled. Nyro's ardent ode to "Emmie" contains the oddly sexy encomium, "I swear you were born a weaver's lover/Born for the loom's desire." She even beat Donna Summer to the punch by seven years with the "Confession" refrain "I'd love to love you, baby"; that song also contains the Prince-worthy lyric, "Super ride inside my lovething."
There are some songs on this record I may not rush to hear again, but one I was extremely happy to (re)discover is the characteristically bumpy singalong "Timer," which contains a surfeit of strange, soulful lyrics and inexplicable tempo changes. Or perhaps it's not such an enigma: The explanation for the song, and for Nyro's different-drummer genius, is right there in the lyric, "God is a jigsaw timer."
A Fresh Ears™ visit to her second album, 1968's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, gives me some inkling why I haven't scaled this mountain before: This record is a lot. Apart from its two hit singles, "Sweet Blindness" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" (which can be heard as two versions of essentially the same song—they're even in the same key), every single song on this album is a hot mess of seemingly improvised yet fully orchestrated tempo, chord, and feel changes. Start to finish it is a disorienting, exhilarating ride which, I confess, I have often had to take breaks from.
Nyro roars out of the gate with the full band and what sounds like the end of a chorus: "Yes, I'm ready!" And then, in what will be one of the album's signature moves, she stops cold for a languid vocal pickup into a shuffling groove and drops this bombshell (these weirdly syntaxed lyrics are exactly as sung, sans typos):
Well, there's an avenue of Devil who believe in stone
You can meet the captain at the dead-end zone
What Devil doesn't know is that Devil can't stayDoesn't know he's seen his day
The song is "Luckie," the title being the name of a character vying with two others, Devil and Naughty (a "dragon with a double bite"). But not to worry, each of these two is a "back-seat man to Luckie," who is "taking over." I have no earthly idea what Nyro is on about here, but I must thank her for this priceless admonition: "Dig them potatoes if you've never dug your girl before." Honestly, now that I see that on the page I realize: The whole thing may be meant as a filthy joke—it does, after all, conclude with the double entendre, "I'm gonna go get Luckie." Still, what comes across more than the lyrical whimsy is the capricious stop-start of the song's tempo and feel, as she rifles blithely through a series of catchy pop hooks, any one of which another writer would build a whole song on, but which Nyro, following her own higher compositional logic or possibly dramaturgy, takes up and drops in succession, as if she's making a medley of greatest hits only she can hear.
And so it goes: "Lu," another tribute to a lover-who-may-be-more-than-a-lover, holds its sunny girl-group composure for most of its running time, before melting into a down-tempo jam...for just 7 bars, after which it speeds up again. I mean, who does this? Even the otherwise straightforward "Sweet Blindness" has that mysterious but enchanting tempo difference between its opening groove and chorus and its loping verse, which the Fifth Dimension version leans into. (Fave moment of this blissed-out ditty: the teasing confessional moment when, after thrice insisting, "Ain't gonna tell you what I been drinking," she can't help herself, quietly and proudly proclaiming, "Wine of wonder.")
From the haunted swirl of "Poverty Train" to the headlong rush of "Eli's Coming," from free-tempo laments like "Lonely Women" and "December's Boudoir" to sneaky bangers like "Woman's Blues" and "The Confession," these songs are all best heard as mini-suites unto themselves. In just 40 seconds the following track perfectly encapsulates both the charm and weird caprice of this record. Listen to what happens to this hard boogie groove about 37 seconds in:
From the haunted swirl of "Poverty Train" to the headlong rush of "Eli's Coming," from free-tempo laments like "Lonely Women" and "December's Boudoir" to sneaky bangers like "Woman's Blues" and "The Confession," these songs are all best heard as mini-suites unto themselves. In just 40 seconds the following track perfectly encapsulates both the charm and weird caprice of this record. Listen to what happens to this hard boogie groove about 37 seconds in:
Listen also for the slightly unhinged refrain that flares up at 2:00, in the midst of what otherwise seems like a playful answer song to the murderous "Hey Joe," as she wails, "Fire, flames of gold rush my mind." It's just one of a multitude of apparent drug references that pervade the record, both metaphorical and literal (the "sweet cocaine" longueur of "Poverty Train," which is really about something "better than" cocaine, i.e., heroin).
So are drugs the reason Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is such a wild, teeming carousel? You could just as easily attribute it to sexual intoxication: Dirty jokes about potatoes aside, the record is starkly frank about lust, both thwarted and fulfilled. Nyro's ardent ode to "Emmie" contains the oddly sexy encomium, "I swear you were born a weaver's lover/Born for the loom's desire." She even beat Donna Summer to the punch by seven years with the "Confession" refrain "I'd love to love you, baby"; that song also contains the Prince-worthy lyric, "Super ride inside my lovething."
There are some songs on this record I may not rush to hear again, but one I was extremely happy to (re)discover is the characteristically bumpy singalong "Timer," which contains a surfeit of strange, soulful lyrics and inexplicable tempo changes. Or perhaps it's not such an enigma: The explanation for the song, and for Nyro's different-drummer genius, is right there in the lyric, "God is a jigsaw timer."
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