Laura Nyro's Final on Vinyl

"Angel in the Dark": A Last Look Back

When I spoke to Laura Nyro in 1993, she had released what was then her last studio album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light. She told me then that in recent years, she hadn't been doing much songwriting, that she had been working on vocal technique and concentrating on being a single mom and raising her son in a lake community near Danbury, Conn. Her distaste for the music industry was clear.

"Not everybody likes dealing with the music business, certain aspects of the music business," Nyro told me then. "Some talented people can't cut it in the music business, because it's not appealing to them, and nurturing to them. I find it very natural and healthy to not always be dealing with the music business."

She would die of ovarian cancer in 1997, age 49. But before she did, she worked on another collection of songs that were released posthumously in 2001 on CD as Angel in the Dark by Craft Records. Half were originals, and half covers. Recorded in 1994 and 1995, it's also about half solo piano…