Laura Nyro biography

Synopsis

Early Songwriting Career

Singer; songwriter. Born Laura Nigro on October 18, 1947 in the Bronx, New York, Laura Nyro was the daughter of Gilda Mirsky Nigro, a bookkeeper with the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Louis Nigro, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter. Laura showed an early interest in music and started composing songs at the age of 8. She attended the High School of Music and Art in New York at the same time as fellow singer/songwriter Janis Ian. As a teenager, she often sang doo-wop in New York subway stations. As she later wrote, "I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth. I mean you could just go out and sing. If I look back now, all these years later, I must have had a spiritual, holistic feeling from all of that."

At age 17, she wrote the song "And When I Die," which she sold to the famous folk group Peter, Paul and Mary for $5,000. In 1966, she won a record contract of her own after auditioning before record company executive Artie Mogull, who had earlier signed Bob Dylan to his first major-label contract. Having long experimented with various stage names, Laura Nigro released her 1967 debut album, More Than a New Discovery, under the name Laura Nyro, which stuck as her professional name. That same year, she performed at the famous Monterey Pop Festival; while Nyro believed her performance had been a failure and subsequently rarely performed in large venues, documentary footage of the concert shows that the crowd actually responded quite enthusiastically to her set.

After her performance at Monterey, record producer David Geffen signed her to a $4 million contract with Columbia Records. This gave her more creative control over her next albums, including the two widely regarded as her best, 1968's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and 1969's New York Tendaberry. The Columbia contract also allowed for Nyro's songs to be covered by other, more established artists such as The Fifth Dimension and Barbra Streisand.

Retirement at Age 24

In 1971, a 24-year-old Laura Nyro announced her retirement from the music business. "When I was very young," she said, "everything happened so quickly for me. I hadn't really contemplated being famous. I was writing music, I was just involved in the art of it at that young age. Then, when it all happened, I didn't know how to handle it." Her father remembered, "Laura was always very sensitive. She didn't like collaboration. She didn't like compromise. She was an artist, and she didn't like—hated—the show-biz part." Nyro took a five-year hiatus from the music business, during which time she married and then divorced carpenter David Bianchini.

Nyro returned to playing and recording music in 1976 with the album Smile. She continued to release sporadic albums over the next