The artist Elton John called his all-time favourite writer: “I never got to tell her how great she was”
No amount of window dressing can cover up a lousy song in rock and roll. It’s one thing to have all the fashions of the day that get people’s eyes on you, but if you don’t have a decent track at the heart of everything, then all that goodwill goes out the window. Although Elton John hardly needed to worry about his credentials as a songwriter in his prime, he thought that Laura Nyro was among the finest that he had ever seen put a melody together.
When looking at John’s discography, though, it’s easy to forget that he was brought up in that same singer-songwriter scene of the early 1970s. The world has written him up as one of the biggest names in the glam-rock movement alongside David Bowie and T Rex, but while his contemporaries were into zany styles of rock, John was more interested in artists like Bob Dylan and James Taylor as well.
Sure, he had a lot more musical finesse than a lot of his contemporaries, but songs like ‘Roy Rogers’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ could have easily come out of that singer-songwriter mould. Just replace the piano with a fingerpicked guitar half the time, and you would have a pretty decent version of a James Taylor song.
While that scene was rooted in folk and rock and roll music, Nyro came from a completely different perspective. She certainly rubbed elbows with people like Carole King at the time, but her background was always more soul, even taking a few cues from the world of jazz in the way that she constructed a lot of her melodies.
Although she faded into the background of the scene in the 1970s, no one forgot her in the credits of their albums. Looking through the biggest pop stars of the day, some of their biggest hits came courtesy of Nyro, whether that was Three Dog Night having a hit with ‘Eli’s Comin’ or Blood Sweat and Tears covering ‘When I Die’.
Even though John had albums like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road under his belt when transitioning over to Geffen Records, he specifically wanted to change labels to be closer to Nyro, telling PBS, “David was in my consciousness because he was involved with Laura Nyro. Laura Nyro was one of my favorite singers of all time and writers of all time. Not meeting Laura [is] something I always regret. And unfortunately, she passed away so early in her life, I never got to tell her how great she was.”
Looking through a lot of John’s work, it’s easy to see where Nyro rubs off on him. While many of his early pieces involved him working out the bugs of his sound and even incorporating classical sequences into his work, a track like ‘Burn Down the Mission’ wouldn’t have existed without Nyro, complete with the different mood changes and using chord progressions that were a lot less common in standard pop songwriting.
While Nyro passed away in 1997 due to complications while battling cancer, that doesn’t mean that she has faded into obscurity. She may not have had the major chart success of her peers, but anyone looking to improve their songwriting owes it to themselves to take a deep dive into her work and see everything that’s possible within the pop song format.
