Margo Guryan
Filled with delicate orchestral backdrops, sensitive lyrics and brilliantly crafted hooks, Margo Guryan’s Take a Picture seems at first to be another welcome addition to the growing vaults of backward-thinking twee masterpieces. However, as fervent record collectors would be happy to explain at length (after having shelled out $200 or more on eBay for the album), Guryan’s lone record isn’t reminiscent of pop’s golden era — it’s from it. Schooled in jazz composition at Boston University and the Lenox School of Jazz, Guryan abruptly changed her songwriting focus after hearing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, taking direct inspiration from a record that continues to serve as the blueprint for today’s melody makers. In 1968, she released Take a Picture, a collection of eleven brief beautiful love-centered songs. Inexplicably, the album had little commercial impact (although its first track, “Sunday Morning,” became a hit twice when covered by Spanky and Our Gang and Oliver), but it became a rare and much sought-after missing link in the pop timeline.
Guryan loathed performing in public, which probably contributed to her inability to make a mainstream breakthrough. She also preferred writing for other artists instead of playing her own material, which, from the listener’s perspective, is lamentable because her ethereal breathy vocals are a perfect fit for Picture‘s breezy tunes. On “Love Songs,” she sings pretty love songs always make me cry in a pure, sweet voice that glides gracefully over wispy guitars, and the result should bring tears of joy to a pop lover’s eyes. “Don’t Go Away” and “Love,” both of which feature unorthodox time signatures and seamless pace shifts, reveal the wealth of her music education, and the jazzy touches that surface throughout the album offer another connection to her pre-pop past.
Picture‘s tunes also form the foundation of 25 Demos, a collection of the compositions she’d hoped to sell to producers and other recording artists. Although most of these tracks understandably lack the fullness and polish of the album versions, the songs Guryan arranged receive fully orchestrated treatment, with woodwinds and strings augmenting her voice and electric piano. A few of the unreleased numbers are gems, particularly the uncharacteristically seductive “Come To Me Slowly” and the skittering, almost psychedelic “The 8:17 Northbound Success Merry-Go-Round.”
However, her ’70s recordings prove not everything Guryan wrote was gold. The sub-ABBA creampuff “Yes I Am” and the ill-advised disco dud “Hold Me Dancin'” are nods to the worst elements of the decade’s music, while her Watergate-themed trilogy establishes that Guryan was no Joan Baez. But then, the fact that the type of tunes she wrote in the ’60s remain in vogue is proof that Guryan didn’t need to expand her formula or make any concessions to the times. She was at her best when writing catchy songs about love, and, as both of these discs prove, few have ever done it better.
