Margo Guryan was the personification of sophisticated chamber-pop songcraft and 1960s cool, an artist who made a baroque pop masterpiece that was completely ignored at the time of its release but is now enshrined alongside touchstones of the idiom like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle. Now, Numero Group has just released a three-LP box set compiling the work of this late, great singer and songwriter, Words and Music.
From her humble beginnings as a struggling jazz songwriter to the peak of her 1968 baroque pop masterpiece Take a Picture, from her acclaimed collection of long-unreleased 1970s creations Demos to the recent viral ubiquity of her “Why Do I Cry”, this box set captures the entirety of Guryan’s career, including 16 previously unreleased recordings and 32 pages of expertly curated liner notes and images. Also featured is a new release. It is a never-before-heard version of Guryan’s “Spanky and Our Gang”, a tune written as a thank you to Spanky McFarlane and her band for their hit recording of her song “Sunday Morning”. The collection was produced by her stepson Jonathan Rosner and music historian Geoffrey Weiss, along with Numero Group’s Douglas Mcgowan, Rob Sevier, and Ken Shipley.
A witness to the radical revolutions in jazz and pop unfolding in the late 1950s and 1960s, Margo Guryan worked hard to earn her place in the songwriting pantheon. She studied music at Boston University, where jazz club owner/lecturer George Wein took her under his wing. At his urging after a musician failed to show for a set, Guryan took the stage of Wein’s Storyville jazz club in Boston to sheepishly perform her early tunes, which earned praise from none other than that evening’s headliner, Miles Davis. Margo then went on to be one of only two women invited to study at the fabled Lenox School of Jazz in 1959. Here, she collaborated with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and studied with the Modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis and drummer Max Roach. Margo would primarily write for jazz musicians until 1966. That was when she heard the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the classic “God Only Knows”, a catalyst that exploded her interest in pop music.
Bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie, bossa nova icon Astrud Gilberto, the South African singer/activist Miriam Makeba, and folk hero Harry Belafonte recorded her early jazz songs. She was even chosen to pen lyrics to Ornette Coleman’s classic, “Lonely Woman”. Jazz singers Anita O’Day and Carmen McRae released takes of her material, as did pop singer Claudine Longet and folk-rock icon Mama Cass Elliot. Spanky and Our Gang’s Top 40 recording of “Sunday Morning”, the lead-off track on Take a Picture, was followed by recordings by torch singer Julie London and country royalty Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry. In 1967, Billboard called Margo “one of the most sought-after writing talents in the music business”.
Her baroque pop answer to Pet Sounds, 1968’s Take a Picture, was largely ignored due to Guryan’s decision not to play live or tour to promote it. Within a year, it was in the bargain bin at Tower Records (for the price of 39 cents, according to Jenn Penn’s wonderful liner notes). In the late 1990s, Guryan started receiving unexpected royalties. These came from the healthy sales of pirated versions of Take a Picture from Japan, where critics labeled her “The Queen of Soft Pop”. The album was ultimately re-released in the US in 2000 by Linus Dotson’s boutique Franklin Castle label, where it found a cult audience among critics and esteemed indie musicians, ones who were beginning to embrace the soft but sophisticated baroque and sunshine pop of artists like the Association, Millennium and the Free Design.
The re-release of Take a Picture was followed shortly by Demos, an incredible compilation of unearthed alternate takes and new-to-the-public songs that Margo Guryan supervised herself. Even though she was no longer pursuing a recording career, Guryan’s life in the intervening years remained filled with music. She became a piano teacher, kept writing songs, and established friendships with a new generation of artists who loved her. There is also a limited-edition version of Words and Music that comes with a 10” vinyl of Margo’s Chopsticks Variations, a series of exercises she created for her piano students. This will be the first-ever vinyl pressing of that release.
As a fan of and frequent listener to Margo’s pop output, I find it the first LP in the box set that provides the real revelation – Guryan’s work in the jazz idiom. Her style brings to mind Michael Franks, Mose Allison, and especially Bob Dorough. The latter is best known not only for his collaborations with Miles Davis but also for his contributions to the animated educational series Schoolhouse Rock and tunes like “My Hero, Zero”. This volume includes “Moon Ride”, a bouncy number about an encounter with hungry aliens who seek to make a meal of the interloper, one driven by a walking bass and slick, bop-flavored flute runs. It was a song recorded in a demo session for Atlantic Records.
In “More Understanding Than a Man”, Margo Guryan and crew sound like the Nat King Cole Trio in full flight, while “Kiss and Tell” is a stripped-down piano-driven number where she tells her new man to tell his other girl that their relationship is over. There are more mature lyrical themes in “The Morning After”, which was reportedly written for a former pianist boyfriend, who refused to introduce her as a musician. The standout on this first LP is “Goodbye July”. This is the solo piano demo, another lament that marries the impressionist chordal harmony of Debussy and Satie with a slow jazz stride.
The second LP begins with Margo’s version of her best-known tune, “Sunday Morning”, from Take a Picture. It’s baroque pop with deceptively complex time shifts, funky guitar riffing, and her soft double-tracked voice, which many have compared to French ye-ye singers like Francoise Hardy and Sylvia Vartan. “Think of Rain” is the tune she reportedly wrote the day she rushed out to buy Pet Sounds. Soft brushed drums, gentle organ, and weepy strings adorn this, certainly one of her best and saddest songs.
This record also includes my all-time Guryan favorite, “Someone I Know”, a delightful stop-time romance with a marching beat, a persistent groove kissed with cloudy organ washes and later infiltrated by brass quoting her beloved Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”. Here again, it’s Margo’s voice, something she didn’t love, at its most chill-inducing and wispy. This volume concludes with the psychedelic “Love”, the longest track on Take a Picture. It begins with dissonant harpsichord, echoed piano, stabbing trebly guitars, and a reverb-drenched flute, a sort of free jazz/horror film score before moving into the body of the song in a crossfade to fuzz guitars and a single-chord vamp. Think “Tomorrow Never Knows” as interpreted by the Sun Ra Arkestra.
The final LP includes her latter-day demos from the 1970s. On tunes like “Values” and “I’d Like to See the Bad Guys Win”, there’s a kind of Schoolhouse Rock/Sesame Street bounce to the music, one contrasting lyrics about female liberation and a bit of cynicism about life. On “California Shake”, Margo Guryan funks it up with a tune about the earthquakes that have rattled her home since the mid-1970s Los Angeles. The collection ends with a more elaborate version of “Goodbye July”, which, to my mind, is no match for the stripped-down piano demo.
While she is still not a household name, Margo Guryan’s work has caught the ears of music supervisors in television (“Minx”, “I Think You Should Leave”), film (“Sam & Kate”), and advertising (Tag Heuer). Her demo of “Why Do I Cry” became a TikTok meme, spurring thousands of video clips by (presumably) nostalgia-loving sad girls and sad boys. At last check, the song had 23 million streams on Spotify.
The story of Margo Guryan is one of a woman who dug deep from an early age and was never afraid to change. With her keen feel for tone, phrasings, tension, presence, and lyrics that cut, her name today is synonymous with the most sophisticated 1960s songcraft. Her creativity and technique set her in the tradition of chamber-pop icons like Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach, while the bittersweet candor in her depictions of womanhood suggests a middle ground between Carole King‘s pop-factory and singer-songwriter eras.
Although she is gone, Margo Guryan is someone you should get to know. This set, lovingly and largely spearheaded by the stepson she raised when she left the pop music treadmill, is the best introduction.