Stoney End

Laura Nyro at the piano is already a particular emotional event, but here the arrangement swells into something orchestral and urgent, strings and brass arriving like weather. The song moves in waves — intimate confessions that suddenly crest into open-throated declarations — and Nyro's voice rides those waves with theatrical commitment that somehow never tips into affectation. She was drawing from gospel and Broadway and the Brill Building all at once, and this song is one of the places where those tributaries meet most visibly. The emotional landscape is about yearning and transformation, about reaching toward something that feels simultaneously too large and too necessary to abandon. There's a downtown New York sensibility to it, the late-sixties sense that everything was possible and the personal was never separate from the political or the spiritual. Her phrasing is idiosyncratic in ways that demand attention — she delays and rushes in ways that feel like a singer thinking out loud, working through feeling in real time rather than delivering a finished product. For listeners who find her, she tends to become a kind of private discovery, a songwriter's songwriter whose influence threads through decades of artists without her name ever becoming quite as famous as her work deserves. This is the kind of song you find at twenty and carry with you for the rest of your life.