Laura Nyro was the prototypical confessional singer/songwriter, beginning her career with craftsmanlike compositions that could be and were covered for hits by other artists, but turning, by the time of her third album,
New York Tendaberry, to work that was too personal and idiosyncratic to be performed effectively by anybody but her. Her studio albums of new original material began to come less frequently after her fourth,
Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, appeared in 1970, and
Mother's Spiritual was only her third such LP in over 13 years and her first in five and a half when it appeared initially in January 1984. Confessional singer/songwriters present a certain challenge to their loyal listeners (and the listeners they retain tend to be very loyal). Since they are writing out of intimate, autobiographical concerns, their writing tends to change over the years as their lives change, and listeners may or may not continue to identify with them. Nyro's early confessional work was romantic and dramatic, but by the time of her previous album,
Nested, in 1978, she had become more comfortable and was anticipating the birth of a child, all of which was reflected in the album, naturally.
Mother's Spiritual picked up the story from there, as she presented her toddler, whose voice was actually heard on the disc. And the songs were very much those of a thirtysomething single mother of a small child living in American suburbia in the early 1980s. This was a woman who was devoted to her child and concerned about the world that child was going to grow up in, a world she found still dominated by war and other negative aspects of civilization. She looked at politics, for example (
"The Right to Vote"), and saw no one worth supporting. She worried about consumer culture (
"A Free Thinker"). She supported environmental awareness to the point of name-checking
Greenpeace (
"The Brighter Song"). As a feminist, she expected a male partner to share domestic duties (
"Talk to a Green Tree"), but while she still wanted "everything" from a relationship (
"Roadnotes"), she was no longer sure that romantic love was as transcendent as she had thought previously, or even if it should be heterosexual. ("I'm not waiting/for Miss or Mr. Right," she sang in
"Melody in the Sky.") At very least, all of this represented a development from the way she had looked at things 15 years before, and while many of her early fans may have made similar journeys through life, they may not have been in as complete agreement with her as they had been before, especially because she was spelling things out so directly. Their adjustment might have been made easier if Nyro had been more musically accessible, but her record label,
Columbia, seemed to have long since given up any idea (if it ever had one) of participating creatively in her work, contenting itself merely to release albums of music she wrote, recorded, and produced on her own in her home studio.
Mother's Spiritual may have pleased the artist herself, but, with its loosely structured jazz-pop arrangements, seemingly written (or improvised) around her highly individual piano playing and singing, it was the sort of disc that demanded close and repeated listening to appreciate, listening that already devoted fans might be expected to do, but not others, which may help explain why the album turned out to be commercially negligible. Nevertheless, it stands up as another chapter in Nyro's ongoing musical autobiography, and the 2009 reissue on the
Iconoclassic label increases its value by adding a live take of the song
"Man in the Moon" as a bonus track and informative liner notes by Nyro biographer
Michele Kort. ~ William Ruhlmann
