Margo Guryan
Margo Guryan (1937-2021) was an American songwriter and singer who grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. She studied at Boston University, wrote songs for jazz singers from the late 1950s and moved towards pop after hearing the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds in 1966. Her album Take a Picture (Bell Records, 1968) went almost unnoticed because she would not tour to promote it, and it found a cult following after a reissue in 2000. Guryan attended the Lenox School of Jazz in 1959, and Chris Connor recorded her song "Moon Ride".
28 Demos
When not gazing out windows into the stormy Manhattan skyline, Margo Guryan spent her thirties banging out earworms for the likes of Bobbie Gentry, Jackie DeShannon, Claudine Longet, Carmen McCrae, and Julie London at CBS’s April Blackwood Music. Guryan’s timeless musings on love, Sundays, earthquakes, crying, and boys named Timothy have soundtracked countless films and viral videos—enduring masterpieces from the before times. 28 of her ’60s and ’70s songwriting demos are collected on this 25th …
Take A Picture
Take A Picture is Margo Guryan’s one and done classic — one of record collecting’s real unheralded masterpieces — bright, breezy, lightly psychedelic, and utterly cosmopolitan, recorded in New York City no less. Newly restored by Jessica Thompson from the original two-track safety masters, this beguilingly melodic 1968 pop tour-de-force has never sounded better.
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Words And Music
Witness to revolutions in jazz and pop, Margo Guryan earned her place in the songwriting pantheon and then some. That she was largely unknown for decades is not the stuff of crushed dreams, but a result of her own choices and priorities. From humble beginnings to the peaks of her 1968 baroque pop masterpiece Take a Picture;and the collected Demos;to the recent viral ubiquity of “Why Do I Cry”, Words and Music captures the entirety of Guryan’s career, featuring 16 previously unreleased recordings…