History
Nyro premiered some of the songs that were to appear on the album at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. The song "Luckie" was derived from an earlier composition Nyro had played at her audition for Verve Records in 1966. Before she signed to Columbia Records, Verve had already planned to release the album, under the title Soul Picnic. The new title is a play on two songs from the album: The name Eli is from "Eli's Comin'"; while the "thirteenth confession" is derived from "The Confession", the thirteenth track on the album.
The album saw its actual release in 1968 on the Columbia label and became one of the year's underground successes. The album was written entirely by Nyro, arranged by Charlie Calello and produced by both. On Nyro's insistence, the album's lyric sheet (which itself was a rarity for records in 1968) was perfumed, and fans have reported that it still has a pleasant aroma.
The album's themes are of passion, love, romance, death, and drugs, and the songs are delivered in Nyro's distinctive brash neo-operatic vocals. Musically, it is a multi-layered and opulent work, including multi-tracked vocals, jazz instrumentation and strings. The album's loose genre is pop, but it also incorporates elements of jazz, opera, soul, gospel, and rock.
It is generally considered to be Nyro's most accessible and most famous work, although it is arguably not the most commercially successful or critically favored (both honors go to the follow-up, New York Tendaberry). The album was her first chart entry, reaching No. 189 on the Billboard 200, when it was known as "Pop Albums."
The album is second only to its predecessor, 1967's More Than a New Discovery, in producing hit songs for other artists. Three Dog Night took "Eli's Comin'" to US No. 10, while The 5th Dimension went to US No. 3 with "Stoned Soul Picnic" and US No. 13 with "Sweet Blindness".
Read more about this topic: Eli And The Thirteenth Confession
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“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)