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(Rounder)
pounds 13.99
This album is incomplete, but so was Laura Nyro's life. It is the project on which she was working when she died of ovarian cancer four years ago this Sunday, aged 49, and it represents a precious addition to the luminous output of nine studio albums and two live recordings that attracted admiration and affection over the three decades of her career, even though she never truly fulfilled the music industry's early expectation that she would become one of the most popular performers of her generation.
She was in her teens when she wrote And When I Die, Wedding Bell Blues and Stoney End, big pop hits in the late 1960s for Blood, Sweat and Tears, the Fifth Dimension and Barbra Streisand respectively. Think about that - a 17-year-old composing And When I Die, with its tumbling structure and that blithely morbid lyric: "My troubles are many/ They're as deep as a well/ I swear there ain't no heaven/ And I pray there ain't no hell." And she was barely 20 when she wrote Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, her second album, a cycle of 13 songs full of astonishingly sophisticated musicianship and a young woman's wildheart poetry: "Silver was the colour/ Winter was a snowbell/ Mother of the windboys/ Living off the lovewell."
If...