Nico - Chelsea Girl [Yellow]

Nico's solo debut Chelsea Girl is chamber-folk at its most haunted and beautiful, and this reissue presses its pale, wintry glow onto yellow vinyl.

Released in 1967, the same year she sang on The Velvet Underground & Nico, the album surrounded her deep, stately voice with songs from an extraordinary circle of friends. A teenage Jackson Browne contributed songs and guitar, Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison all chipped in as writers, and producer Tom Wilson framed it all with strings and flute that Nico herself famously disliked.

These Days is the jewel, Browne's wistful song about regret and moving on, delivered with a heavy-lidded calm that makes it devastating. The title track, written by Reed and Morrison, sketches the residents of the Chelsea Hotel in cool, unflinching detail, and her reading of Bob Dylan's I'll Keep It with Mine carries a strange, lonely grandeur.

Decades on, those once-unwanted orchestrations sound like part of the album's spell, lending the record an elegant melancholy that countless singer-songwriters have chased in the decades since its release.

For anyone who first heard These Days in The Royal Tenenbaums, the full album is a gorgeous rabbit hole to fall into, and the yellow pressing makes a lovely home for it.