To celebrate Women's History Month, The Current is spotlighting some of the most iconic women artists in music history, from the greats of yesteryear to some of today's most exciting young voices. To complement our programming, we've compiled insights and recollections from eight singular songwriters, exploring the genesis of landmark songs and albums and the mysteries of the creative process.

One afternoon [then-husband and co-writer] Gerry [Goffin] and I were walking down Broadway to retrieve our car when a long black limousine with dark windows pulled up alongside us. The rear window rolled down and revealed [Atlantic Records co-founder] Jerry Wexler. He got right to the point.

"I'm looking for a really big hit for Aretha."

He didn't need to say her last name. Miss Franklin had already enjoyed several top 10 hits. We moved closer to the car to hear what else he had to say.

"How about writing a song called 'Natural Woman'?"

Gerry and I looked at each other. What a great title! We could do that. Wexler saw our look and nodded. Then he pressed the button to roll up his window, Gerry and I stepped back onto the sidewalk, and Wexler's face disappeared into the darkness. We watched the limo ease back into the flow of traffic down Broadway, then Gerry and I began walking again…

With me bubbling over and Gerry thinking out loud in his thick Brooklyn accent, we continued to reaffirm our ability to deliver the requested song all the way to the lot where our car was parked.

Having a specific assignment that we had every reason to believe would lead to a cover by a top-selling artist was highly motivating. As soon as we came out on the Jersey side of the tunnel, Gerry put on WNJR to inspire the right musical mood. Arriving home, we parked in the driveway, went into the house, and found Willa Mae presiding over the children's after-dinner playtime. We spent some time with the girls, but we were chomping at the bit. We kissed them good night and headed up to the red room. I sat down at the piano, put my hands on the keys, and played a few chords. It was unbelievable how right they were, and we both knew it.

Four decades later Gerry remembered it this way in a phone call as we reminisced about writing this song:

"You sat down at the piano and out came some gospel chords in 6/8 tempo. Those chords were exactly where I thought the song should go. You made it really easy for me to come out with the lyrics. You made it effortless."

I don't know that I would have called it effortless. Our preparation and discussion on the way home had been an important part of the process. It put me in the right place to be a conduit for those chords. And then, once we had a verse and a chorus, effort was involved in thinking of a slightly different lyrical direction for the second verse that fit with the music already set up by the first verse. If Gerry thought my chords were exactly right, I was blown away by his lyrical imagery. A soul in the lost-and-found … a lover with a claim check … How did Gerry come up with these things??

The next day we recorded a piano-vocal demo and brought it to Jerry Wexler. He loved the song and said he'd get back to us after he played it for [Atlantic co-founder] Ahmet [Ertegun] and Aretha. As soon as we left, Wexler took our demo into the other room and played it for Ahmet, who also loved it. Then they had to play it for their engineer, Tom Dowd, the arranger, Arif Mardin, and then, of course, the song had to be approved by Aretha herself. Evidently she liked it enough to give it the final and most essential thumbs-up.

We didn't know about any of these interim steps until after the song had been recorded. We remained in limbo for days … We heard nothing — not a word — until Jerry Wexler invited us to come in and listen to the finished recording.

Oh. My. God.

Hearing Aretha's performance of "Natural Woman" for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin.

Few people would consider it hyperbole to call Aretha's voice one of the most expressive vocal instruments of the 20th century. Hearing that instrument sing a song I had participated in creating touched me more than any recording of any song I had ever written … [Her] performance sent our song not only to the top of the charts but all the way to heaven.

When I first started writing, I used to write more fictionally. The first three albums were more or less characters, like "Marcie" [from her 1968 debut, Song To a Seagull]. Like any fiction writer there was some basis in something that happened, but after the Blue album I went through a period where I wrote very personal songs. I did a series of self-portraits, scrapings of the soul, and I went through that for a long time. I remember when Blue was first recorded, that was the first really confessional kind of writing. It was like, nothing left to lose, let's spit it out, and when it was finished I went over to a friend's house and Kris Kristofferson was there. I played it. He said, "Joni, save something for yourself." It was hard for him to look at it.

I'll just tell you what you have to go through to get an album like that. That album is probably the purest emotional record that I will ever make in my life. In order to get that clean … you wouldn't want to go around like that. To survive in the world you've got to have defenses. And defenses are necessary but they are in themselves a kind of pretension. And at that time in my life, mine just went. They went and you could call it all sorts of technical things. Actually it was a great spiritual opportunity but nobody around me knew what was happening. All I knew was that everything became kind of transparent. I could see through myself so clearly. And I saw others so clearly that I couldn't be around people. I heard every bit of artifice in a voice. Maybe it was brought on by nervous exhaustion, Whatever brought it, it was a different, un-drug-induced consciousness. In order to make that album we had to lock the doors in the studio. Only [engineer] Henry Lewy and I were in there. When the guy from the union came to the studio to take his dues I couldn't look at him. I'd burst into tears. I was so thin-skinned. Just all nerve endings. As a result, there was no capability to fake. The things that people love now — attitude and artifice and posturing — there was no ability to do those things. I'll never be that way again and I'll never make an album like that again.

By the time I got to The Hissing of Summer Lawns I was back to doing portraits again. By that point, people were used to me being a confessional artist and the result of that subtle change was a lot of people didn't like Hissing because if I was saying "I'm like this," that "I" could either be them — if they wanted it to be — or if it got too vulnerable, they could go, "It's her." But the moment I started doing portraits again, saying "you," a lot of people saw themselves more than they wanted to. Then they would get mad at me. That happened a lot … There's no way you can control how people interpret or what they see in those things. It has nothing to do with you, really.

You're always working towards reporting instead of editorializing — just seeing things as they are. Having been autobiographical at one time in my life, I suppose people will always think everything I do is a self-portrait, but this is not so. However, there is always some kind of identification with the subject matter. You have to have experienced the emotion.

That's why I was so pleased when Prince said Hissing was his favorite. You know, that album was called all sorts of awful names. Of all my children, that was the one that really got beat up on the playground. So for him to say that in the same rag [Rolling Stone] that kind of started the war against it was a treat for me.

It was storming the night Stevie wrote the lyrics to "Dreams." Thunder echoed through the Record Plant [a studio in Sausalito, California] as Stevie made her way through the stygian hallway to Sly Stone's pit with a little electric keyboard and her velvet-covered notebook. Stevie: "There was a big black circular bed with Gothic curtains hung around it. I hopped up on this bed with my little piano and wrote 'Dreams.' I recorded it on a little cassette machine, and then I walked across the hall to the studio and said, 'I think you're going to want to hear this.' They said, 'We're busy.' I repeated myself and said, 'I really think you're going to want to hear this.' They listened to 'Dreams' and we recorded it the next day." Amid the drawings of angels, flowers, and fairies in her journal were lines of loneliness and heartache. Her spirits were low and rubbed raw by the coruscating loss of love. Yet there was hope in the rain, that it could wash away the burden of loss and cleanse the soul for a new life. She implies the power of crystal visions, esoteric and secret knowledge that she possesses and keeps to herself. Her dreams are prophetic. The loss will eventually be worse for her lover than it would be for her. "You'll know," she says. "Ahh, you'll know."

Stevie has also pointed out that "Dreams" is the other side of "Go Your Own Way," a song she saw as angry but honest. "So then I wrote 'Dreams,' and because I'm the chiffon-y chick who believes in fairies and angels, and Lindsey is a hardcore guy, it comes out differently. Lindsey is saying go ahead and date other men and live your crappy life, and Stevie is singing about the rain washing you clean. We're coming at it from different angles, but we were really saying exactly the same thing."

("Dreams" would become Fleetwood Mac's only ever No. 1 single release. Stevie later said that "Dreams" was "totally related" to a song by the Spinners, but couldn't remember which one. Observers have suggested "I'll Be Around" as a possible model.)

When Janet Jackson began working on Rhythm Nation 1814 with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis at Flyte Time Studios in Edina, Minn., the singer told Rolling Stone magazine about her lofty goals for a concept album addressing social issues. "I wanted to make the album because there was an audience that wasn't being reached, who really aren't paying attention to what's going on in the rest of the world. I felt that I could reach that audience through the type of music that I do. I'm not the first person to do this — I know that. I know that I won't be the last … I feel that most socially conscious artists — like Tracy Chapman, U2 — I love their music, but I feel their audience is already socially conscious. It's like college kids, that whole thing. I feel that I could reach a different audience, let them know what's going on and that you have to be a little bit wiser than you are and watch yourself…

"You know, a lot of people have said, 'She's not being realistic with this Rhythm Nation.' It's like 'Oh, she thinks the world is going to come together through her dance music,' and that's not the case at all. I know a song or an album can't change the world. But there's nothing wrong with doing what we're doing to help spread the message."

Jackson traced the origin of the album's title for the Los Angeles Times: "I was reading about all these clubs and I thought it would be great if we could create our own nation … One that would have a positive message and that everyone would be free to join … I wanted to take our message directly to the kids, and the way to do that is by making music you can really dance to. That was our whole goal: How can I get through to the kids with this?" And why was 1814 added to the title? "I was kidding around, saying, 'God, you guys, I feel like this could be the national anthem for the '90s," she told US magazine. "Just by a crazy chance we decided to look up when Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem, and it was 14 September 1814."

Tori Amos: On building a "sonic installation"

[From a 2007 interview with American Songwriter]

Normally, I'm able to detect a musical theme from song to song. I get a hint of what a project is going to be when the songs start coming to me again. Usually there's a time after I finish a project … where the faucet gets turned off for a while — then it's more about drinking in information and observing. I start collecting in my musical toolbox experiences and observations and sounds and rhythms, and I just start building that up again. And when the sounds start coming, whether that's a year later or whenever that is, I usually know, "OK, so, this sounds like a Hammond organ, this could work well with this kind of composition," and I begin to see a framework … A lot of the time, I look at the whole work. Pieces have to work together for there to be this sonic installation. It can't just be random things thrown together, it doesn't work. Sort of like a meal where you have Japanese and Swedish and Indian and Thai, but after a while, it's just, uhhh … there's no harmony in it.

I've read a lot in my life. Maybe a lot of poetry, from Rimbaud and Baudelaire to Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, some of the great poets of our time. It sets a standard — you start to look at how certain people describe emotions, or describe something visual that they see. I think as a songwriter you can get trapped into writing songs that are like the ones you hear on the radio, and sometimes you want to do that and sometimes you don't, because by the time your song comes out, that'll be dated. So you have to think, "Where am I going for my reference points?" And sure, sometimes I will hear something that makes me think, "Well, I like the way that they were using alliteration, I like the way they are making your senses work in this song," but you can apply it to what you're doing while making sure it comes out in a really different way. So yeah, of course, I'm always trying to expose myself.

Visual artists affect me a lot too. 'Cause when you think about it, if you're looking through art books, say you can't even get into the museums for whatever reason, so you go online and look at pictures, and just in looking at a Dali painting, you can start describing it with words — and as you start jotting down what you see, then you can say, "Oh my goodness! I love this line, I've never heard anything quite like it before." So I go to different mediums. Usually not other lyricists, not other songwriters, because you don't want to steal. I listen to the good ones, I know what they're doing, I know what they're up to, but then you have to go do your woodshedding.

People have often asked about my songwriting process and all I can say is this: It takes many forms. Intentionally so. I don't ever want to write the same song twice so I try taking different routes to the finish line. Experimentation leads to unpredictable results and is not the path to surefire success but it is a path to discovery and discovery is way more fun. I've always felt the predictable perfections of pop music to be numbing. They feel more like anti-art than art to me, those songs that cashiers sing along with the radio. Am I a snob? Anyway, I think my songs tend to connect with other people who also enjoy encounters with the unexpected.

Songs can come through in something like a moment of alignment and, at those times, there is very little need for a lot of earthly intentions steering the process. Mostly my songs seem to come through while I'm in an altered state and the very best part is waking up from the trance to a feeling of profound satisfaction. I wake up to the fact that I have transformed my pain into something more beautiful and useful than it was in its original state. I wake up to a vindicating calm because I've allowed something to leave my body and be reborn in the world as something better. And not only that, now I have something to offer the world: a contribution.

Songs like that, that come of their own volition, often have a vitality that serves to carry them along through the world., They are born with their purpose, like some people are. But not all songs are like that. No … not even close. Other songs can be more elusive in their purposes or flat-out refuse to sign up for a purpose at all. Or they may veer off from my best intentions and invent some tragic purpose all their own. Some take a lot of wrestling to even find a place where they can exist. Some are epic and require sustained dedication and concentration. Those ones will challenge your stamina and leave you equally drained as satisfied. It's true that the songwriters say: Songs really are like children.

St. Vincent: On "Birth In Reverse" (2014)

[From a 2014 interview with Rick Moody at Salon]

I wrote it maybe 48 hours after I got back from a year and a half of touring. So I did my [2011] solo record Strange Mercy and that led literally right into the production rehearsals and tour with David Byrne [74 concerts in 2012 and 2013]. I flew from Japan, finished the Strange Mercy tour, got in at midnight, started production rehearsals the next day. Whatever, I'm not complaining. It was very non-stop is what I'm trying to say. And I wrote "Birth In Reverse" in my apartment in New York. Music first, but I had mouthed — certain syllables and sounds were suggesting themselves when I was singing gibberish to the melody. And then I was reading Lorrie Moore's [1998 short story collection] Birds of America, and she used this phrase "birth in reverse" to describe the way a room opened up. And so I wrote it down. I didn't have designs on it but I just, you know, kept it there tucked in my back pocket, and then I went back to revisit that song, that music, and I started singing, "It's like a birth in reverse all along."

That's how the chorus got started. I wrote the chorus, and I took it in to the studio and I actually even, I sang it — I laid down the whole track — with the sense that it was right, it was right for the song. Without the sense that I had every nook and cranny of this figured out. And John Congleton, my producer, was like, "Wow, this is — so a birth in reverse is death, right?" And I said, "Oh my god! You're right." For some reason — that's exactly what death is — that never occurred to me.

Brandi Carlile: On "The Joke" (2017)

"'The Joke' started off with [producer/co-writer] Dave [Cobb] insinuating that we haven't had a vocal moment like [the 2007 song] 'The Story' since, well, 'The Story,' " Carlile told NPR.org. "We all went home that night and I was like, 'Who tells you to rewrite a song that you wrote a decade ago?' But it just kept nagging me — like the truth does, you know."

To inspire Carlile, Cobb turned to Elvis Presley's 1972 medley, "An American Trilogy." "There's something magical about that recording," Cobb mused. "It's the way it affects you; the way it's big in the chords, just pulling every single emotion out of you. So I played that, and then she wrote 'The Joke.' I played her one of the greatest songs of all time, and then she wrote one of the greatest written since that one." [Carlile's band members and collaborators, Tim and Phil Hanseroth, also co-wrote the track.]

Carlile explained the source of the song's message to Songwriter Universe: "I just have been feeling global and social politics a little bit more emotionally than intellectually over the last year. And I wanted to write 'The Joke' as an anthem for myself and anybody that was feeling kind of unloved or unseen or illegal, just to remind us that our time is coming. We've already won. The joke is on those in temporary power. Love has already conquered the world."

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