As anyone who has ever been entranced by her music can attest, when Laura Nyro sings, time often stands still. Her smoky soprano soars with a power that is as hypnotic as it is daunting, and her meditations on life and love glide along an unfailingly soulful groove. This is Nyro's first studio album in nine years, but it finds the singer-songwriter's work as patently seductive as ever.
touches on a range of topics. There is a moving lullaby to her son ("To a Child"), a provocative call for animal rights ("Lite a Flame") and a respectful ode to the earth ("Broken Rainbow").
That they are all so of a piece is part of the magic of Nyro's impressionistic style. After nearly 30 years as a recording artist, she still makes it seem as if she's just discovered her muse. (Columbia)
Janis Ian
On this, her first album in more than a decade, the performer and songwriter displays the same wisdom that she first revealed on her hit about an ill-fated interracial romance, "Society's Child," in 1967, when she was just 15. From "Tattoo," an unnerving portrait of a Holocaust victim, to "Some People's Lives," a breathtaking love song, Ian shows an understanding of basic human emotions all too rare among songwriters—young or old.
Whether discussing her artistic quests ("Walking on Sacred Ground") or her generation's sociopolitical currents ("Guess You Had to Be There"), Ian uses her intimate vocal style to get under your skin and her keen sense of wordplay to get into your thoughts. (Morgan Creek)
Cypress Hill
B-Real, the lead rapper for L.A.'s Cypress Hill, has an adenoidal squall that makes him sound as if he has overdosed on helium, but his cartoonish delivery has served him well. Cypress' self-titled first album burst out of nowhere to become one of 1992's biggest-selling rap offerings. The trio (B-Real, Sen Dog and DJ Muggs) laid loopy, stoned, bilingual commentary on top of bass in-yo'-face beats, masterminded by producer Muggs. Their pea-soup groove, combined with a what-me-worry attitude toward their favorite subject, pot, and a gangsta-lite touch made Cypress the rappers du jour among both home and frat boys.
Why tinker with a winning formula? On this chart-topping album, Cypress offers more of the same good, funky thing. Once again they touch upon their favorite hobbies, loading up the pipe and the shotgun—although, as B-Real points out in "Hand on the Glock" (a virtual remake of '92's "Hand on the Pump"), Cypress has graduated to automatic weapons. Sure, Black Sunday is almost a Xerox of the first record, but considering how much herb these guys smoke, it's possible they forgot they did the songs before. (Ruffhouse/Columbia)
Various artists
Whatever the failings of Nora Ephron's movie hit Sleepless in Seat-lie, it performs al least one invaluable service: sending audiences in droves to buy the film's soundtrack. Ephron's When Harry Met Sally. .., a movie carpeted wall-to-wall with Sinatra devotee Harry Connick Jr., in 1989, introduced the MTV generation to the glories of Gershwin. Now the Sleepless soundtrack, which rocketed into the Top 10 within two weeks of its release, is acquainting them with such composers as Hoagy Carmichael and classic recordings including Nat King Cole's "Stardust," Gene Autry's "Back in the Saddle Again" and Mr. James Durante's inimitably gravel-voiced tribute to the fine art of "Makin' Whoopee."
While one could do very nicely without Celine Dion and Clive Griffin's overblown pop rendition of "When I Fall in Love," it is, after all, a simple matter to turn back to Durante's peerless "Make Someone Happy." Does the choral backup give the Comden-Green-style anthem a high corn content? You bet. Wanna make something of it, Mrs. Calabash? (Epic)
>Laura Nyro
STILL SAVORING THE '60s
LAURA NYRO IS UNBLUSHING ABOUT her lifelong affection for rock and roll's golden girl-group era of the early '60s. "That music is about real singing," says the 46-year-old Bronx-born artist. "There's a passion for melody, for phrasing. It's sweet, it's street, it's wonderful. Whenever I go out to perform, or even if I just sit down at a piano, I always naturally want to sing those songs. I call them my primal teenage heartbeat songs."
Though she prospered as a hit songwriter in the late '60s—the Fifth Dimension's "Wedding Bell Blues," Three Dog Night's "Eli's Coming," Barbra Streisand's "Stoney End" and Blood, Sweat and Tears' "And When I Die" are all her compositions—Nyro says she's always looked upon her songwriting as the means to an end of artistic expression rather than as a commercial enterprise. "It really was a complete surprise to me whenever one of my songs became a hit," she recalls. "I just worked on my craft, and the next thing I knew, I would hear my work on the radio."
These days, Nyro, the single mother of a 14-year-old son, divides her time between homes in New York and Connecticut. "I must have the city and the country in my life to be complete," she says. And her writing has taken a turn toward sociopolitical themes. Among them: feminism ("The voices of the movement have to be kept alive") and prejudice ("To me, prejudice is ignorance. It's the opposite of love, the opposite of God"). "Songwriting," she adds, "is a very open, growing process. And as you experience life, it's only natural to reflect those experiences in your art."
- Contributors:
- Billy Altman,
- Amy Linden,
- Joanne Kaufman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
