Laura Nyro was a songwriter’s songwriter, a prodigiously talented teenager from Connecticut, but inextricably linked to New York City. Between 1967 and 1971, she released five records of soul-meets-gospel-meets-show tunes-meets-rock ’n’ roll, influencing everyone from Elton John to Carole King to Joni Mitchell.

I’m not sure I got Nyro as a kid, when her music would float through the walls of my bedroom from a record player elsewhere in our house in Wales. There’d be the odd flash of something. The climax of “Tom Cat Goodby”—where the shuffling pop of the first half segues into the terse, tense repetitive line: I’m going to the country, gonna kill my lover man, for instance. Her compositions and musical decisions felt like challenges, obstacles to overcome, and as someone mostly used to chugging four-four rock ’n’ roll at that point, they often went over my head.

As a songwriter, I’ve been trying to unlearn a lot of those early, subconscious influences on what I do when I pick up a guitar, listening to music beyond my usual sphere. Laura Nyro tunes always lingered in my memory, and I found that in revisiting her music as an adult, more of the abstractness began to crystallize: the opulence of the songs, the physicality of hearing her move around the piano keys and sing from deep in her chest. Nyro spoke about seeing music in terms of colors, shapes, textures, sensory things. Listening to her sing is like watching an artist throw colors onto a canvas, each movement informing the next.

There are a lot of descriptions of Nyro as being shy, or not tough enough for the hard-bitten world of the music industry. People cite that as the reason why her songs are best known in the hands of others. To me, it doesn’t wash. She sounds like a star—like every breath and note and tempo change is a choice from someone who is deeply in love with her art. Watch her singing “Poverty Train” at Monterey in 1967. The camera is close, her eyes are darting around the room and her jet-black hair is indistinguishable from the darkness of the stage. Then there’s her voice: colors, shapes, textures.