Go Find the Moon: The Audition Tape

Album review

In 1966, aspiring singer/songwriter Laura Nyro sat at the piano to audition for Warner Bros. A&R agent Artie Mogull and producer Milt Okun. Nyro was 18 at the time, and had been writing songs for about a year but had yet to venture into music professionally. Go Find the Moon: The Audition Tape is the audio documentation from that meeting, capturing the flashes of Nyro's songwriting brilliance that were apparent even in the nascent stages of her development. The recording is casual and unpolished, with no overdubs but with a few false starts and between-song chatter included. Even in this raw form, Nyro's performances are powerful. The collection begins with a bounding rendition of "And When I Die," an original composition of Nyro's that Blood, Sweat & Tears would take to the top of the charts just a few years later. Along with the tender ballad "Enough of You" and the cool, strolling title track, Nyro runs through a few song fragments just for demonstration purposes, playing a brief medley of pop songs of the day at the request of the record executives. It's a short listen, just shy of 19 minutes, but Go Find the Moon puts us in the room at the very beginning of one of the greatest songwriting journeys in American history. The studio albums that followed shortly afterward are a better representation of Nyro's musical gifts, and these early demo recordings will be more exciting for devoted fans than first-time listeners. All the same, being a fly on the wall for this meeting is a fascinating window into Nyro's story, showing an artist already operating at full force as she's taking the first steps down the path she'd be on for the rest of her life.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo