Poverty Train

On this haunting track from her sophomore album, Laura Nyro sings from the perspective of an addict in the midst of a terrifying drug trip, where "You can see the walls roar, see your brains on the floor" as the Devil watches with a grin. While she mentions cocaine in the song, it was really about heroin (the song's arranger, Charlie Calello, says in the biography Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro by Michele Kort). A year after Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was released, the singer's 21-year-old cousin died of an accidental heroin overdose.

Nyro was a frequent pot smoker but typically stayed away from harder drugs, except for a bout with LSD that conjured horrific hallucinations like the ones described in the song. The New York Times noted in the 1968 article "Laura Nyro: She's the Hippest - and Maybe the Hottest?": Laura has since stopped using acid because of the medical evidence that it is genetically dangerous, but it seemed useful to her at the time. She refers to the event as "the day I became a woman." During the experience, monsters - half men, half rats - filed into her room and menaced her from the walls. She summoned the strength to resist them, and after nine hours of spiritual combat they withdrew... "I won the struggle for myself," she says. "I stopped being a loser and became a winner instead."

This features jazz musician Joe Farrell on the flute. "He kind of turned it into Alice in Wonderland, almost," Nyro told Down Beat magazine in 1969. "He came into my world, and he really enhanced it."