My happiness depends on you: giving voice to the unsung women of pop

My new album, Woman to Woman, is a study in femininity, in giving voice to female characters idolised, yet silent, in famous pop songs. It all started when I was in a hotel room in Spearfish, South Dakota, learning to play Loretta by Townes Van Zandt. I looked the words up and was copying them to my journal, and realised I was really reading the words for the first time.

This was a song I had loved enough to try learning to play it, but on closer examination found kind of infuriating. Among other things, Van Zandt says of Loretta that she “loves me like I want her to”. Reading that line in that moment, I had a revelation. What if Loretta could tell her side of the story, what would she say? How would the story change? What does she want?

That night, I gave up learning to play Townes’s tune and instead wrote a song from Loretta’s voice called Tumbleweed. Once I’d heard Loretta in this new way, I felt as if I was listening to a lot of the old music for the first time – and it inspired me to get to work. I wrote a song from the perspective of Dolly Parton’s Jolene, Elvis Costello’s Alison, The Kinks’ Lola, the Beach Boys’ Caroline, the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, Bob Dylan’s Ramona, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, the Band’s Evangeline, and Leadbelly’s Irene.

As a songwriter, I usually scour my life for new material, so writing this record was an interesting project. I believe that our experience is the only truth we can honestly claim – and to create this album, I had to reach deeper than my own life and into the stories of these fictional women, into what makes each of these characters human. I had to ask myself: how would you feel if a man slept with you, got you pregnant and then said: “You are not my lover” and “The kid is not my son”? The Billie Jean I have created in What Do You Call a Woman? is angry as hell and rightfully so. And how would I feel if a woman called me up saying that her boyfriend, a guy that to me seems like a two-timer and a creep, is obsessed with me and would I please not steal him from her? In Never Chase a Man, my Jolene tells Dolly’s character that she deserves better and she should find a man that can return her love.

As the project progressed, I asked how I would feel if I was at the end of my life, an old woman living alone, and knew my number was up any day? Would I feel lonely? My Eleanor Rigby greets her death with courage and peace, putting on her makeup just for herself and singing to a bluebird on her window sill. I believe that a conversation about the experience of being a woman must include everyone that also identifies as a woman. The song I wrote as Lo-lo-lo-lo-Lola called Oh Let’s Dance, in which I describe the Kinks’ character’s unapologetic flirtatiousness.

The key thing I realised writing this album was that I had never really known what some of my favourite songs were about. A catchy melody or an amazing singer takes the spotlight while the story being told takes a backseat. One aim of this project was to take an in-depth look at songs about women that I had heard hundreds of times before and to finally really listen.

Woman to Woman gives a voice to female archetypes shown one-dimensionally in pop music. The record aims to transform these characters into women, to make them human.

• Woman to Woman is released in the UK on 2 February on Xtra Mile Recordings