Songfacts®:

• This track from Laura Nyro's debut album is about a black-eyed beauty who lounges all day on a sunny hillside and catches the eye of the narrator's boyfriend, Johnny. She spots the two of them together and laments, "Once, I too had someone loving me." In reality, Nyro - still a teenager when she wrote many of the songs on the album – was inexperienced in the love department. But she often found inspiration in the lives of others and shaped their experiences into songs.
  
  Alan Merrill of The Arrows, whose aunt married Nyro's uncle, was close to the singer and believes "Lazy Susan" was inspired by his crush on Susan Shapiro, the shapely valedictorian of his high school class. He told Michele Kort, author of Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro: "I was always talking about Susan to Laura, obsessively. Laura craved a close, loving relationship with that sort of intensity for herself. She felt that Susan just had things come to her so easily, and envied her."
• Though critically acclaimed as an artist in her own right, Nyro was better known as a songwriter than a singer. Many of the tracks on her debut album – and subsequent releases - became hits for other artists, such as The 5th Dimension ("Wedding Bell Blues," "Blowin' Away") Blood, Sweat & Tears ("And When I Die") and Barbra Streisand ("Stoney End").
• This features jazz great Toots Thielmann on the harmonica.
• A Lazy Susan is also a tabletop swivel tray that helps distribute food. It was a popular addition to the dinner table in American homes during the '50s and '60s.
• More Than A New Discovery was originally released by the Verve Records imprint Verve Folkways in 1967. Two years later, operating under the name Verve Forecast, the label reissued Nyro's album as The First Songs. On both releases, this tune is track #5.
• British jazz musician Liane Carroll covered this on her 2007 album, Slow Down. That same year, it was also recorded by American jazz singer Amy London on her album When I Look In Your Eyes.