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Laura Nyro's Eli and the 13th Confession is my favorite album of all time but I have always felt vaguely dissatisfied with the review I wrote of it. I feel like I was trying to capture something about the album, and about where I was in life when I was listening to it, but I was a bit too overwhelmed by the circumstances to actually articulate anything about it.

So here I am, trying again.

Other albums I have called my favorite of all time, roughly in order: The B-52's, This Year's Model, Together We're Heavy, Lincoln, Forever Changes, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Steve McQueen, ただいま。 [Tadaima.].

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Yes I'm ready.

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Did I ever tell you guys how I got into Laura Nyro in the first place? Okay, see, from the years 2017-19 I made "being into 70s/80s Japanese music" my entire personality--in many ways, it's still the thing I'm known for on here, the fact that you can look up random city pop albums and see stupid little tossed-off reviews I wrote there. And the reason for that is that I was living in Switzerland, I knew no one and didn't speak the language, and I was... I was desperately longing for the experience of being somewhere else where I knew no one and didn't speak the language. Except, of course, I did not actually want to be there--I wanted to channel my feelings of wanting to be elsewhere into a concrete object, and that object was Showa-era Japan. For some reason.

Anyway, one of the artists I got super into was 吉田美奈子 [Minako Yoshida], who I still maintain is underappreciated, and much of what I could find about her called her "the Japanese Laura Nyro"--either that or it fixated to an unhealthy degree on the fact that she uses the personal pronoun "boku", 1980s Japan was actually not as ahead of the curve as people thought at the time but man they got in on the ground floor w/r/t pronouns. And so...

I can actually pinpoint the exact date. It would have been Thursday, November 15, 2018, because that's the date that I flew from Switzerland to New York, officially moving back to the USA. I was spending my first night there, sleeping on the fold-out couch in my parents' living room (when I went away to college the first thing they did was downsize from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom apartment, one of the many things I have not forgiven them for), and I was like, huh, I should give this Laura Nyro person a try.

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I was delirious. I was ensorcelled. I wasn't exactly sure what I was hearing--like, it sounded very much like a sixties pop record, vaguely soul-based but also kind of bubblegum--but

weirdly, I kind of feel like if you haven't actually listened to Eli you should maybe stop reading and just listen to it now, I can't believe I am going to say this but what follows is I think spoilers, spoilers for an album. So the most attention-grabbing thing about Eli is that Laura Nyro will change the tempo and the rhythmic arrangements of her songs constantly, seemingly almost at random (but, upon repeated listens, with incredible care), sometimes in the middle of a line, and seemingly for absolutely no reason. I genuinely don't think that I have ever listened to a pop artist other than her that does things that way, before or since, although here is as good a place as any to mention that Stevie Wonder's "If You Really Love Me" was a conscious attempt to write a song that sounded like Laura Nyro.

And add to that: Laura Nyro is not particularly fond of conventional verse-chorus-verse song structures--"Once It Was Alright Now (Farmer Joe)", for example, can be described as being just six different choruses and nothing else--and tends to use these kind of jazzy chords that feel... tense, exhilarating but tense. What you end up with an album that, at first, to me at least, felt incomprehensible. Absolutely exhilarating, but in way I couldn't quite describe--an absolutely physical, visceral experience, but one where I had no clue where any of it was coming from. The metaphor I always come back to for describing what listening to Eli for the first time felt like is that it felt like getting run over by a train, and what is there to understand about that? But it was something that I desperately wanted to understand!

Which might explain why I spent the next... god, the next solid months, just listening to Eli over and over again as I attempted to find an apartment and get off of my parents' god damn couch, letting it drive me slowly insane.

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I actually do think, after a solid seven years of hardcore Laura Nyro obsession, during which I have acquired a law degree and a daughter, I eventually did solve it, for the given value of "solve": Eli and the 13th Confession is the Ulysses of pop music.

I am aware that I sound like the PBS Ideas Channel guy talking about Homestuck, but all that video boiled down to was "both of them are long and difficult to understand", a very surface-level take--besides, we all know that the literary modernist that's the best comparison for Homestuck isn't actually Joyce, it's Nabokov. But the Ulysses comparison, imho, works way better for Eli, and here's why:

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This is of course incredibly reductive, but the general thesis of Ulysses is that "normal people" are all, in fact, significantly weirder than you think they are; that, in fact, there is no such thing as a normal person, because everyone contains within themselves such a dizzying array of... thoughts, feelings, experiences, culturally-mediated memories--

--sidenote, I always thought it was kind of funny that as a modern reader when you're first getting into Ulysses and you get to the Bloom chapters they're just a confusing and impenetrable as the Steven chapters, because, well, the pretentious and college-educated Steven makes a bunch of high-minded philosophical references, but most of what Bloom thinks about is Italian light opera and pulp literature, in other words pop culture. It's stuff that people reading in 1922 when the book came out would instantly recognize! And considering that book is set in 1904, it was also nostalgia bait. Imagine if a novel came out now and the main character was constantly going on about Britney Spears and Harry Potter--

--also speaking of opera, Eli is a remarkably operatic album, in all the best ways. It really deserves the full Bayreuth Festspielhaus treatment. And to put it in a more geographically and temporally appropriately idiom: I have a Laura Nyro jukebox musical plotted out in my head which I'd like a to actually sit down and write the script for one day. It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Maybe I should have done that for this commission instead of writing a review, actually--

--and where do you go from there? Well, going back to Nabokov: when he taught Ulysses at Cornell he instructed his students to basically ignore all of the illusions to Irish history and politics in the book... but he also made them all buy maps of Dublin and geographically plot out the movements of every character throughout the book. And, as someone who was part of a Ulysses reading group in Zurich while also pursuing a degree in geography... well, that speaks to me.

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What does this have to do with Laura Nyro? Well, her New York City is a lot like Joyce's Dublin: this kaleidoscopic visual/sensory maze, hypnotic and strange, where people, people who themselves contain entire universes within themselves, travel. And bump into each other. Like, one could say that Laura herself is the protagonist of her album--more on that later, perhaps--but as she journeys through it she meets Luckie & Naughty, The Devil, The Lord, Lu, Eli, Timer (who i think is a cat--there's also a cat in Ulysses), sweet Emily, the terrifying Farmer Joe, etc. It's an album with a dramatis personae, in other words!

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Which on the one hand points to its incomprehensibility, because a lot of what both Eli and Ulysses are about is how, given that every individual is an endlessly deep universe of experience, given that everyone is so unfathomably strange... how is connection between people possible? This is Bloom's dilemma: he's the eternal outsider (among other things, a Jew in an antisemitic society), and he desperately desires closeness with his wife Molly and with Stephen, a son in search of a father just as he is a father in search of a son. Everyone, in fact, wants this, everyone wants to be understood and to be connected, but absolutely no one can do it, because it's all just so complicated.

(some days I think the most emotionally affecting bit in Ulysses is when, in the middle of an incredibly awkward conversation, Stephen asks Bloom why restaurants put the chairs on top of the tables when they close and Bloom just... tells him)

And this is the feeling you get from Eli, not so much in content as in form--this feeling of being surrounded by endlessly complex humanity and trying to form some kind of connection with them and being... being in many ways frustrated, frustrated every turn, but still trying. And that process of trying being the joy!

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Foreshadowing, perhaps: in many ways the timing of this commission is perfect, because just as I discovered Eli the first time I moved back the New York, I am now writing this the second time I moved back to New York. And a big reason I wanted to move back to New York is that here you can, like, walk around and run into people.

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There's another level to Ulysses, of course, just as there is another level to Eli. Because--and this is in many ways the logical outgrowth of the first point that we all contain a cosmos of strangeness within ourselves--Ulysses posits that this means that there is no such thing as the mundane. That's the reason for the whole Homeric structure: everyone, in fact, exists on the level of mythological heroism.

Eli... Eli is a bit different here. Laura Nyro is not particularly concerned with the pagan, see--but on the other hand, well. The thing about Laura Nyro is that her dad was an Italian Catholic and her mom was Jewish and so she got two of the most intense flavors of religious guilt at the same time. And you can tell! In many ways, the mood of Eli is this joyous, bacchanalian abandon (maybe she was concerned with the pagan after all), but it's always cut with this undercurrent of dread. Like, the album's big hit is "Stoned Soul Picnic", which is a song about getting high in the park, but then inexplicably in the middle of the song you get the line "down from the sky comes the Lord and the lightning"... that's real terror! And that's how the intermingling of the mundane and the mythological manifests for Laura Nyro--not in elevation, but in holy terror. Eli is an incredibly joyful, exhilarating listen, but it's also incredibly anxious.

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To this, I can only say: who can relate? Woo.

No, seriously. I had a panic attack during a Microsoft Teams call at work the other day. I had to mute myself while I hyperventilated. And so this is another level on which this album, like, hits me.

(i will also just touch on this briefly: this is also an album about love, and desire. only in 1968 could you get away with referring to having sex as "super ride inside my lovething", but somehow Laura Nyro makes it work. and the dread and anxiety of this album suffuses that too, not least of all because Laura Nyro was bi--speaking of 1968, i am still kind of amazed that she got "Emmie" on a record then, but i am glad she did. and talking about this is maybe a bit of a tumblresque cliche but listening to this album a bunch of times helped me in the way i think of my own bisexuality, so i'm very thankful for it for that reason, among many others)

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I do want to kind of talk about the music some more, include a bit here that's more of a conventional review, so here goes: Laura Nyro's 1968 album Eli and the 13th Confession is the greatest album ever recorded. Track picks are the hyperbubblegum "Sweet Blindness", the ego-death-gospel "Eli's Comin'", the girl-group-prog "Timer", and the operatic love ballad "Emmie", but actually every track on here is perfect. Laura Nyro's debut album, the one before this, is also pretty much perfect, even though it's very much conventional 60s pop (she didn't have creative control over it and she kind of disowned it). The album after, New York Tendaberry, is also pretty much perfect, and is significantly darker and more experimental--it, more than anything else, prefigures all those art pop albums that are in the rym top 100. Then Christmas and the Beads of Sweat splits the difference between them, and is probably the Laura Nyro record I come back to the most. After this she does a really great album of soul covers with Labelle, and then briefly retires from music--she made five perfect or near-perfect albums before she turned 25, which is just absurd. Post-retirement she's come back occasionally, and her stuff there is very hit or miss, although do not sleep on Nested, that one's really good. 5/5, 10/10, etc.

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In many ways I love Eli because it feels... all-encompassing, like it encircles everything, or at least everything that matters to me.

And perhaps symbolically, Eli also pulls my absolute favorite musical trick: it's a loop. Those three chords that start the album, the "yes I'm ready" on "Luckie", come back at the end, encircling the totality of human experience in:

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Love. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.