This Underrated 1968 Pop Album That Inspired Elton John Still Sounds So Good Almost 60 Years Later

Long before Sasha Colby and, later, Chappell Roan were dubbing themselves your “favorite performer’s favorite performer,” these covertly influential artists were hiding in plain sight, helping shape entire genres without necessarily dominating the charts themselves. In 1968, one of those artists was Laura Nyro, a singer-songwriter who combined elements of jazz, soul, and R&B into her original music and the songs she wrote for other major artists like Barbra Streisand and The 5th Dimension.

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Nyro began her career in the late 1960s as a fairly successful songwriter. But her solo performances could be somewhat divisive. Reviews of her Monterey Pop Festival performance in 1967 were less than glowing, with some people recalling the crowd booing her off stage. She found herself at odds with her record label around this time and eventually transitioned from Verve to Columbia, with David Geffen as her manager. Her sophomore release was the first to drop on this new label.

Eli And The Thirteenth Confession might not be one of the most readily recognizable album titles in the 1960s musical canon. Nonetheless, it helped shape the sounds of those whose names lingered at the top of the charts. Nyro was your favorite artist’s favorite artist’s favorite artist, you could say.

Laura Nyro’s ‘Eli And The Thirteenth Confession’ Was Full of Oddities

From the packaging to the musical contents therein, Laura Nyro’s second release, Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, felt distinctly unique. Columbia granted Nyro greater creative control than she had on her debut album, and she took full advantage of it. One of the most notable aspects of the album’s physical design was the lyric sheets included in each sleeve. Lyric inserts were still uncommon in the late 1960s. And Nyro went one step further by asking for the printers to use ink with a fragrance.

“Decades later, the textured paper still maintains a pleasant aroma,” Michele Kort writes in Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro. The back of the sleeve featured an image of Nyro kissing the head of a young girl. The girl is actually Nyro in three-quarter size, which Nyro said was to represent her “kissing seventeen years of her life—her childhood—goodbye.”

The music, of course, is a feat of its own. Tracks like “Eli’s Comin’” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” proved to be successful hits for more mainstream acts like Three Dog Night and The 5th Dimension. Although Nyro’s relationship with the music industry soured in the years and decades that followed, Eli And The Thirteenth Confession remains a highly influential work. It helped shape the sounds of artists like Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Cyndi Lauper, Alice Cooper, Patti Smith, and Kate Bush.

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