Laura Nyro / The First Songs / 1966
Blowing Away
giddy, feverish, lightheaded
An early Laura Nyro composition built almost entirely on sensation rather than narrative, this song uses the image of fire and wind to describe infatuation as a loss of physical control. It's less a story than a sustained metaphor for giddy, destabilizing desire, repeated and intensified until the words themselves start to dissolve into pure sound.
infatuation loss of control transcendence through desire possession/surrender ecstatic repetition
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unnamed lover directly, using second-person epithets; the voice is immersed and almost delirious, not reflective or distanced, so it reads as reliable in feeling even if the images are deliberately imprecise.
What happens
There isn't a plotted sequence of events so much as an escalating emotional state. The speaker begins by naming the lover as a consuming fire, then shifts to calling him a dreamy, powerful hold over her, and finally imagines him as an almost mythic, not-quite-real presence occupying her doorway and her mind. Each verse adds a new nickname and a slightly more abstract description of his effect, while the chorus returns each time as a release valve, repeating the same sensation of lifting off the ground.
How it's built
The song follows a verse-chorus pattern where each verse introduces a new pet name and metaphor for the lover, but the chorus stays nearly identical throughout, functioning like a refrain of pure feeling rather than development. By the end the structure breaks down further, with the final chorus repeating and stretching the central phrase until it overtakes the lyric entirely, mimicking the sensation it describes.
Section by section
Opening verse
The lover is introduced through fire imagery, establishing heat and hunger as the dominant sensations; the language is physical and immediate rather than descriptive of circumstance.
First chorus
“I feel so high, I feel like I may”
The chorus pivots from heat to altitude, swapping burning for floating — the speaker's response to desire is imagined as literal weightlessness, introducing the song's governing metaphor of blowing away.
Second verse
The nicknames shift from elemental force to something gentler and more psychological, framing the lover now as a kind of fantasy or daydream, while the described effect becomes an inexplicable power holding her in place even as she claims to be floating.
Third verse
“Ain't been born and bred”
This verse pushes the lover into near-mythic unreality, suggesting he's as much a mental or imagined presence as a physical one, occupying thought and space simultaneously.
Closing repetition
The song abandons new lyrical content and loops the chorus's key phrase into a dissolving vocal pattern, letting form mirror content as the lyric itself seems to blow away into fragments and breath.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Fire, heat, and wind recur throughout, linking desire to combustion and then to weightlessness, as if passion first burns and then lifts the speaker clear of the ground.
- epithet/naming
- Each verse assigns the lover a new compound nickname instead of a name, keeping him abstract and interchangeable with the feeling he produces rather than a specific person.
- anaphora and repetition
- The chorus's repeated phrasing, especially its core gerund, is restated with mounting intensity, enacting the drifting, uncontrolled sensation the lyric describes.
- sound over sense
- Toward the end, words fragment into near-nonverbal repetition, letting rhythm and vocal texture carry meaning beyond what the lyrics denote.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats the song as a vivid, almost physiological account of infatuation — desire rendered as fire, then as flight, with the lover kept deliberately vague so the focus stays on the sensation rather than the relationship. A secondary reading could hear the "not quite real" lover and the dissolving final chorus as hinting at something more spiritual or hallucinatory, an encounter with an idealized or imagined figure rather than a literal partner, though the song gives only impressionistic support for that stronger claim.
Context
This track comes from Nyro's earliest recorded period, before the more harmonically and structurally adventurous songwriting of her late-1960s albums. It shows an artist already comfortable with loose, sensation-driven lyrics and vocal improvisation, though in a simpler, more pop-oriented frame than her later, more celebrated work. I don't have reliable specific information about the song's composition history or chart context.
Listen for
- The shift in imagery from heat/fire in the verses to lightness/floating in the chorus
- How each verse's nickname for the lover changes in tone, from elemental to dreamlike to mythic
- The way repeated words in the closing section drift from language into pure vocal sound
- Any vocal inflection suggesting breathlessness or rising pitch that mirrors the 'blowing away' sensation
About Laura Nyro
Laura Nyro was an American songwriter and singer. She achieved critical acclaim with her own recordings, particularly the albums Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968) and New York Tendaberry (1969), and had commercial success with artists such as Barbra Streisand and the 5th Dimension recording her songs.
1947 - 1997 / United States
Full biography and catalogue