"Eli and the Thirteenth Confession" is the second album by New York City-born singer, songwriter, and pianist Laura Nyro, released in 1968.
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 during her 1966 audition for Verve Records. Before she signed with Columbia Records, Verve had already planned to release the album under the title Soul Picnic, but it was eventually released by Columbia in 1968 and became one of the year's underground successes. The album, which was written entirely by Nyro, was arranged by Charlie Calello and produced by both Nyro and Calello.
The front cover photo was taken by Bob Cato, and writer Michele Kort described Nyro as resembling a "dark Madonna with luxuriant red lips." The back cover featured a black-and-white silhouetted photo of Nyro kissing the head of what appeared to be her younger self. Nyro later explained that this image symbolized her "kissing seventeen years of her life—her childhood—goodbye." On Nyro's insistence, the album's lyric sheet was printed with perfumed ink, which still retained its pleasant scent as of 2002.
The themes of the album touch on passion, love, romance, death, and drugs, all delivered in Nyro's distinctive brash, belting vocals. Musically, the album is layered and opulent, incorporating multi-tracked vocals and strings. Though it is rooted in pop, it also blends elements of soul, gospel, jazz, and rock.
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is often considered Nyro's most accessible and well-known work, though it is not necessarily her most commercially successful or critically favored album (those honors go to New York Tendaberry). The album reached No. 181 on the Billboard 200 chart, then known as the "Pop Albums" chart. In February 2016, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was ranked in the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time by Uncut magazine. The album has had a lasting influence on many musicians, including Elton John and Todd Rundgren. Paul Shaffer, bandleader of the Late Show with David Letterman, even named it his "desert island record" in a 2013 interview.
The album was also influential in spawning hits for other artists. Three Dog Night took "Eli's Comin'" to No. 10 on the U.S. charts, while The 5th Dimension had a No. 3 hit with "Stoned Soul Picnic" and a No. 13 hit with "Sweet Blindness."
In terms of legacy, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession remains an influential album. It is featured on the 1997 compilation Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro, which includes six songs from the album. Six songs from the album were also included in the ballet Quintet, performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Rolling Stone ranked the album No. 463 in its 2020 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
The album's impact was highlighted in April 1997 when The New York Times called it one of the late-'60s' "most influential pop recordings." Critic Stephen Holden praised Nyro's "fiercely emotional singing" and the songs' "abrupt changes of tempo and style" as reasons why the album was "unlike anything that had been heard" in the genre. Later that month, Entertainment Weekly's Alanna Nash dubbed Nyro "pop's high priestess" and one of the genre's "most influential American songwriters."
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is often credited with inspiring a generation of "quirky, reflective songwriting," particularly among women artists. In 2015, Vivien Goldman, writing for The Vinyl Factory, stated that the album "instantly transfixed a generation" and continued to shape the "personal, opera-tinged" style of artists like Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, and Alicia Keys.
The album was reissued in an expanded and remastered format in the summer of 2002. The reissue included three previously unreleased demos recorded in November 1967, where Nyro performed solo, multi-tracking her own vocals on piano for songs like "Lu", "Stoned Soul Picnic", and "Emmie." The reissue also included a booklet with photographs, recording details, and liner notes by Rick Petreycik, along with a recollection by Phoebe Snow. Additionally, in 2011, the album was re-released on audiophile vinyl by Music on Vinyl with high-resolution digital audio at 96 kHz / 24 bit. In June 2016, Audio Fidelity reissued the album on hybrid Super Audio CD, featuring the original stereo version in high-resolution digital audio as well as a previously unreleased 4-channel quadraphonic mix created in 1971. Prior to this release, only one track, "Eli's Comin'", had been issued in quad on a rare Columbia Records sampler LP.
