TODD RUNDGREN
The Runt salutes Laura Nyro’s Eli And The Thirteenth Confession.
“Before The Beatles, you just did what comes naturally, find a couple of friends and one of your dads buys the instruments, one of you is the pretty boy out front. But The Beatles changed everything, so I formed The Nazz. “One time, I was hanging out in Philadelphia at a friend’s house, an orthodox Jewish household, and they had Laura’s first album, More Than A New Discovery. It was a poppy record, but the chord changes were great, and I liked her voice. “But when Eli And The Thirteenth Confession came next, she’d had some sort of transformation, like she’d matured five years inside a year, the setting was a striking and unusual combination of classical and contemporary. There was the depth of her performance, the raw emotionality and poetry of her piano-based songwriting. For a Jewish girl in the ’60s to make that kind of music was remarkable; it affected my writing, mightily, which led to the end of The Nazz, because I started writing music that was less appropriate for some powerpop combination of The Who and Beach Boys. I also wanted to sing the material. I hadn’t been upfront about singing before, my voice was still adolescent and underdeveloped. “I was most affected by Eli’s songs that had a great dynamic, not just a steady rhythm but lots of vibrato and breathing, which enhanced [her] soulfulness. It was thoughtful, you could hear her connect with herself in those long rubato passages and pauses of indefinite length. Poverty Train represents a lot of what I like about the record. It’s very melancholy and dark, but once you hear the whole record, it comes into context. To me, Laura was a little lost, which partly inspired what she did. She created something pretty unique, a lot of imitators followed. I never felt I could accomplish what Laura did, so I never tried. [But] when I went solo, and got to Something/ Anything?, people started comparing me to a common influence on Laura and I, Carole King. But I didn’t want to be compared to anyone, so my next album was A Wizard, A True Star – probably every influence I’ve ever had from anywhere!”
“IT WAS LIKE SHE’D MATURED FIVE YEARS INSIDE A YEAR.”