Like Flying

“Musical Architecture” is a beautiful short film — a window into the art of songwriting, a moving recording of Laura Nyro’s thoughts about her life in music. The film was made in 1995 by her partner painter Maria Desiderio, shortly before Nyro’s death from ovarian cancer at the age of 49 in 1997.

She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012: 

The NY Times described her as “An Enigma Wrapped in Songs.”
Nyro's sensitivity began young; she quit piano lessons at 8 because the stern teacher made her cry and Nyro subsequently had little formal training until she attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. But she began writing songs at 8, too, pounding away at the family's Steinway grand piano.

By age 12, she practically slept with a keyboard. At 14, as a junior camp counselor, she turned color-war songs into five-part harmonies. At 16, she sang doo-wop in subway stations and shut herself in her bedroom to listen to Mary Wells and to the Ronettes. And at 17, she sold her first song, “And When I Die,” for a $5,000 advance, to Peter, Paul and Mary.

And when I die, and when I'm gone,

There'll be one child born

In this world to carry on,

to carry on.

Salon wrote, R.I.P Laura Nyro 

- the announcement Wednesday that Laura Nyro had died of ovarian cancer started some fires on the Internet and in the street: hot coals of shared musical memory stoked by the passing of this exotic, erratic, original talent...  

 The doo-wop and girl-group rock that filled the streets of New York then informed her songs (an influence paid homage to in the ’71 release “Gonna Take a Miracle”), but so did the jazz she grew up with, the folk she heard in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village, gospel, show tunes, soul music – Nyro’s music was like the polyglot city from which it sprang, rich and surprising with an odd hint of danger.

Many of Nyro's songs, passionate and urgent messages were written when she was a teenager. She introduced audiences to her “San Francisco sound” with her first professional appearances at the Hungry i coffehouse at the age of 18.

At 20, she wrote “Save the Country,” in response to the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 6, 1968, just two months after Kennedy informed a crowd in Indianapolis of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968.

Come on people

Come on children

Come on down to the glory river

Gonna wash you up

And down

Come on people

Come on children

There's a king at the glory river

And the king loved to sing

In the sun -

"We shall overcome"

I got fury in my soul

Fury's gonna take me

To the glory goal

In my mind I can't study war no more

Save the people

Save the children

Save the country

In my mind I can't study war

In my mind I can't study war

There'll be trains of blossoms

There'll be trains of music

There'll be music...

... I think that in music there’s a oneness, there’s a sweetness. Or there can be. What I call music, anyway, the music I like. I go to it for that oneness and that sweetness. If you look at the world, there’s so much separation. It’s all polarities, wars. But to sense a oneness and a sweetness, I mean, that was it. That was the ultimate. The best thing in life. And I did sense that in music. So that’s what is divine to me. That’s a form of the divine. 

— Laura Nyro, from Performing Songwriter

For Nyro, songwriting was “like flying.”
“In songwriting, I know no limitations.”