Laura Nyro laid that devil down and built a dream with love for the dark and dramatic disillusion of this tender treatise. With the critical success of her first album for Colombia Records, 'Eli and the Thirteenth Confession', she worked on her own in the studio recording her songs onto tape to play for an arranger. Nyro had wanted to work with arranger Gil Evans; but, since he never responded to her, she ended up working with Jimmy Haskell for 'New York Tendaberry'.
Nyro would explain: “We’ll sit and talk until he knows as much as he can possibly know of what I feel and where this album has to be. I know that he’s there already, because on Bobbie Gentry’s album (Billie Joe) he creates the delta, and it’s syrupy, and you can almost hear the crickets and bugs. And on Old Friends (Simon and Garfunkel) he really captured the right mood . . . he can do that. I don’t want him to write like Gil Evans, I’m not going to ask him to give me a Gil Evans sound or anything like that ... all I want him to give me is this tendaberry...It is not an obvious one . . . not one that you really even listen to, because it really goes past your ears and it’s very sensory and it’s all feel . . . it goes inside, like at the back of your neck, or something. It’s abstract, it’s unobvious and yet I feel that it’s very true. I feel that it’s life, what life is to me anyway. Tendaberry is my own word, it’s an essence, it’s not death . . . it’s birth and it’s very tender, very fragile, very strong, very true . . . it’s a berry, a tendaberry...I hold the music in my head and I write the lyrics down, usually. I want music that’s going to go with my lyric; you know, let the words compliment the music. I want to marry my lyrics and this is a tough one, because I don’t have it finished, yet. The lyrics are finished, but, musically, I have been resculpturing and resculpturing, because it’s just not where I want it to be, yet. I know where I want it to be and I keep working on it to get it there...I think of my albums as a lifeline. Eight months will go by and I’ve written ten songs and, for some reason, those ten songs form a circle and it’s a very natural process. That’s what’s happened with this album (New York Tendaberry). Since my first album (Eli and the Thirteenth Confession), I wrote these songs, and, when I sit down to write, there ain’t nothin’ but me and the piano. I know that there are a lot of people who write for a market. I can’t do that . . . that’s out. When I sit down at the piano, I don’t think about other people—will they think this or be that?—I sit down and the communication comes from my heart and on to the paper and the piano . . . that’s where it is and, if it communicates from there—beautiful."
"I know that soon I'm going to be older, and in a certain sense, I am looking forward to getting on in years, to being 30 or 35 and getting a certain maturity, because I have a lot of respect for maturity and I know that I am happier with each year of my life. I also feel that with this maturity will come a certain grace, because I’m a little bit reckless. I want to do my own television special because I know what can be done and it isn’t being done—I have such wonderful ideas for a special—all little, precious things...[Pop music is] going through a renaissance and that it has gone through decadence . . . like innocence and ignorance. The pop music of the ‘50s communicated those times ... these times are smashing and a lot of truth is being sought out, because you can’t live without truth...you can’t live, you can only survive, and I feel that there is a renaissance about it all now...The world is going through a moral revolution and, sometimes I feel like a mirror in a storm—a mirror that’s smashed against the earth. I don’t read newspapers, but I know what’s going on...I started at the bottom of the barrel, in the gutter,” she observes, “and it’s just a whole different feeling now, I feel protected.”
http://www.lauranyro.com/
'Save the Country'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNXCojJmLps
'Time and Love'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_69YAIa2CE
'New York Tendaberry'
full album:
"You Don't Love Me When I Cry" - 4:24 (Rec: 3/21/69)
"Captain for Dark Mornings" - 4:38 (Rec: 2/11/69)
"Tom Cat Goodbye" - 5:32 (Rec: 3/5/69)
"Mercy on Broadway" - 2:18 (Rec: 3/5/69)
"Save the Country" - 4:36 (Rec: 3/4/69)
"Gibsom Street" - 4:47 (Rec: 10/4/68)
"Time and Love" - 4:24 (Rec: 9/20/68)
"The Man Who Sends Me Home" - 2:52 (Rec: 3/5/69)
"Sweet Lovin' Baby" - 3:55 (Rec: 3/5/69)
"Captain Saint Lucifer" - 3:17 (Rec: 1/21/69)
"New York Tendaberry" - 5:33 (Rec: 2/11/69)
