For half a century, Spilt Milk was remembered as a footnote: a lost Laurel Canyon-adjacent curio, a promising start by a vanished songwriter, or most commonly, a victim of critical overkill. At December’s end, 1971, the critic Robert Christgau—writing in the same early iteration of his “Consumer Guide” reviews column in which he rewarded Hunky Dory an “A-”—harpooned the dozen-song debut of Laurie Styvers, a 20-year-old University of Colorado student who had stumbled into a major-label deal while a teenager living in London. “Normally, I ignore records as rightfully obscure as this one,” he wrote, squaring up to an album that had been out on Warner Brothers for a month. He called Styvers trite, “pretty-poo,” and fashionably troubled, then hoped she choked on her own money. “Oh shut up, Laurie,” he concluded. Of the hundreds of records Christgau reviewed by that rubric across two decades, Spilt Milk was one of just 15 to earn his “E” admonition: “proof,” as he put it, “that there is no God.”
But in his rush to year-end judgment and jokes, Christgau missed a sharp and idiosyncratic snapshot of how it feels to try growing up, especially when everyone else (sneering older critics included) tells you that you’re doing it wrong. Escaping to the country to take drugs and cavort, grappling with dawning traces of mental illness, navigating real love within a presiding ethos of free love: These are the multitudes of Styvers and her Spilt Milk, a piano-driven wonderland that invoked the buoyant pop side of Laurel Canyon vogue to frame a complicated internal portrait.
After a 50-year absence, Spilt Milk and its more settled but only slightly less striking follow-up, 1973’s The Colorado Kid, have been lovingly restored as a single generous set that alternately suggests the opulence of recent Weyes Blood and the precision of vintage Aimee Mann. What’s more, rigorous liner notes by producer Alec Palao portray Styvers, who died in 1998 after a long battle with hepatitis, as a fascinating person, not just Christgau’s punching bag or someone Stephen Malkmus liked to put on mixtapes, as he did in a 2006 Rough Guide. “What I’ve been through all these years has made me who I am,” a 21-year-old Styvers sings during one of her second album’s little stunners. Now, at last, we know a bit about who she actually was.
When Styvers, then Laurette Stivers, was still a teenager, her family left Texas for Swinging London, where she fell fast not only for the era’s extravagant fashion but also its interweaving folk and rock scenes. A student at the private American School, she entertained new chums with songs, fell in with the local cast of Hair when it opened there to royal adulation in 1968, and soon answered an advertisement to join Justine, the band of two schoolmates. Their fascinating, self-titled 1970 LP is a flower wheel of acid-folk idioms (and, these days, a collector’s item), its cataracts of harmonies and twisting riffs twirling in the open space between the then-recent debuts of Led Zeppelin and Pentangle. In Justine, she was but one of five singers.
Feather-haired industry lacky Hugh Murphy produced Justine and purportedly recognized the makings of a star (and, unsurprisingly, a sporadic romantic partner) in Styvers. After several members of Justine, Styvers included, were busted for drugs, she returned to Colorado, where she’d vacationed as a kid, and wrote songs of idyllic escape and long-distance longing. When she briefly split from school for London, those endearingly plaintive tunes became the core of her Murphy-produced debut, Spilt Milk.
Styvers was a veteran pianist, most often accompanying her athletic voice, which could track from a whimper to a roar in a single breath, with insistent keys that steadily billowed. But she doesn’t play piano once on her debut, yielding instead to arranger and multi-instrumentalist Tom Parker. The decision is, at least, sadly fitting for an album defined by its constant search for a sense of self. During the sashaying “You Keep Coming Home in the Mornings” and the slowly soaring “All I Ever Had,” Styvers tries to resolve her role among assorted lovers, attempting to parse trysts from commitments. She tries to dissuade herself from mercurial emotions at large during “Leo Loves You,” a hymn of failed rationalization for anyone who’s ever worried they feel too much. And during the brooding “Gemini Girl,” she acknowledges her privilege—the pretty white woman from a family working in oil, raised in London with vacations to the Rocky Mountains—as a way of hedging her relatively minor romantic complaints.
More compelling, though, are Styvers’ solitary protest songs, anthems not only against social expectations as a young woman from a middle-class family but against civil society at large. “Open Your Window” and “Eat Your Cornflakes” wrestle with the reality of a woman’s domestic work. “Instead of playing housewife, you should be playing concert grands,” she sings, as Parker—apparently altogether unaware of irony—dashes out a brief, flashy solo in response. Then there are Styvers’ back-to-the-land stunners. “Pigeons” is her Randy Newman-like number about despising the city, while “Imagine That the Lights Have Gone Out” wants to check out of capitalism through a mix of downers, Ram Dass spirituality, and silence.
Such gentle strains of resistance coalesce on opener “Beat the Reaper,” the tune Malkmus liked to recommend. Telling an effortlessly charming tale about a stoned weekend in the woods with friends, dogs, and lots of MDA, Styvers maintains a childlike glow as she coos about partying until dawn, “smoking or drinking or playing guitars.” It all sounds so pleasantly Dionysian, a rager somehow as gentle as a lazy river. You’ll probably want to join Styvers and her friends at the rented countryside house they indeed called Beat the Reaper, to drop out of whatever rat race to which you are hidebound and lounge, quietly, amid their orgiastic excess.
During a triptych of alternate versions and demos appended to Spilt Milk for this reissue, Styvers at last plays the piano on some of these songs. She is less exacting than Parker, but there’s modest charm to her touch, a sense that these sentiments needn’t be browbeaten. When Styvers is in charge of telling her own story, you can get closer to it, feel that it’s hers. How might Spilt Milk have taken shape had Styvers and not a series of hired men been behind the keyboard and mixing board, had she taken charge of these sessions like the audacious Judee Sill, a California contemporary who also made two early albums for a big label and then vanished?
Styvers did manage to commandeer the piano for much of her second and final album, The Colorado Kid, ceding the seat to Parker only three times. And there’s only one co-write with Murphy. This burgeoning resolve creeps into every element of these 11 songs, like a vine that’s finally found what it needs to sprout and spread. If Spilt Milk was Styvers sorting through the damage and delight of her past, on The Colorado Kid, she was digging into the present while cautiously turning toward her future, saying plainly what she might want and need there—particularly, a dependable partner invested in an equal emotional give-and-take.
The insistent and bewitching “Take Me Into Your Arms Again” is a plea for permanent forgiveness, as she works to cut ties with her libertine history. “White Flowers”—Styvers’ incredible parable of blooming after the fire, beginning meekly and exploding into a massive chorus—is a parallel devotional. She turns away from “the bodies of men you don’t even know about.” Later, she even makes demands for herself: “Come stay with me for a few weeks,” she sings, her voice cool and assured in this new role of authority. “I’ll get you to mean what I want you to mean.”
The arrangements, too, are newly daring. Howling saxophones flirt with dissonance toward the end of “There’s Still Time (Follow Your Heart),” a brief break from Styvers’ spirited repartee with an electrifying quartet of background singers. She invokes samba on “You Can Fly Me to the Moon” and drifts into shadowy psychedelia during “Gather the Grain,” a hymn for independence inside a close relationship. “You be you, and I’ll be me,” she sings, as if nodding to Murphy, loosening his grip. “We’ll gather the grain as we reap.” Chrysalis issued The Colorado Kid in Europe, but Warner Brothers never bothered to release it stateside. Perhaps they assumed that Carole King’s Tapestry, which Styvers had absorbed while writing, made it redundant, flattening the experience of piano-playing women to one. The month of The Colorado Kid’s release, King played for 100,000 people in Central Park; it’s hard to imagine that Styvers’ music couldn’t have found some fans within that throng.
In the reissue world, the temptations to aggrandize tragedy and rewrite history loom large. Does what’s been newly salvaged stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the songs we already know, the singers we already cherish? For Styvers and Gemini Girl, the answer is no. She was a fan and acolyte of King and Joni Mitchell, but her own records, however interesting and winning, lacked the singular vision of those influences. She wrote at least a half-dozen stellar songs that have now been retrieved from history’s dustbin, but they were very much part of her era’s singer-songwriter tide. Spilt Milk deserved better than “rightfully obscure,” but, as reissues often reiterate, such is the music industry’s churn-and-burn cycle.
By most reports, especially those of Gemini Girl’s liner notes, Styvers took it in stride. She did not spend the next quarter-century pining for what might have been; she settled in Texas, rescued animals, and cared for dogs with her dad. “We’re gonna find a cabin/And throw the rest away,” she sang at the end of “Heavenly Band.” At least, it seems, she found some version of that.
