The beauty of writing a song is that you can take inspiration from literally anywhere. You can also, if the mood strikes you, write about one specific person.
Often, songs end up a mixture of both of these approaches — certain lines prompted by real-life people and others more general in nature. This gray area is where it can become hard to tell where factuality ends and where fictional story-telling begins, and in turn, can lead to a whole lot of speculation.
Female singer-songwriters in particular have suffered for decades under the assumption that their creative output revolves around the men in their lives, an antiquated and sexist stereotype that holds little water. When male characters — real or otherwise – appear in women’s songs, it’s more likely because the artist is doing the same thing any other gender of songwriter does: write about the people, places and events they observe in their lives.
Still, when the rumor mill starts going it’s hard to stop it. Below, in no particular order apart from chronological, we’re taking a look at 10 of the best songs written by women, possibly inspired by specific men.
1. “A Case of You,” Joni Mitchell
From: Blue (1971)
Joni Mitchell is famous for what was, in the early ’70s, referred to as “confessional songwriting,” as in the kind of emotionally personal writing that takes directly from one’s own life and exposes it to the world. It was Kris Kristofferson who heard Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue and allegedly warned her to “save something of yourself,” but this approach helped usher in an entire generation of singer-songwriters who scraped at the sides of their souls in the name of art. Because she was so prolific in writing about her emotions, Mitchell’s songs were often examined closely for hints of their potential subjects, and though parts of Blue contained material regarding one of her exes, Graham Nash, “A Case of You” is said to be more about a previous partner, Leonard Cohen, with its allusions to Shakespeare and lines he said to Mitchell.
2. “It’s Too Late,” Carole King
From: Tapestry (1971)
In “It’s Too Late” we have something of a double-hitter. Lyricist Toni Stern penned the words in a single day after her relationship with James Taylor, who played guitar on Tapestry, ended. “I won’t say who ‘It’s Too Late’ is about — I don’t kiss and tell,” Stern said for Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation. That’s okay, we can put two and two together.
Meanwhile, King’s nearly decade-long marriage to Gerry Goffin had also ended and she’d gotten remarried to her bass player, Charles Larkey. “[Stern’s] lyrics, you know, speak for people who are going through divorces,” King noted to CBS in 2012.
3. “You’re So Vain,” Carly Simon
From: No Secrets (1972)
Any song that begins with the words “son of a gun” is bound to be juicy. Enter Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” a track that has beget question after question over the subject’s identity. Among the people whose names have come up over the years: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Warren Beatty, James Taylor, David Cassidy, Cat Stevens, Dan Armstrong, David Geffen and Jack Nicholson. Simon has said that the song is indeed about a real-life man who walked into a party she was at in Los Angeles with an air of egotistic confidence, but has refused to name him specifically and has also insinuated it is a conglomerate of several people. Either way, if you recognize yourself in the lyrics to “You’re So Vain,” you may want to reevaluate your personality.
4. “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” Joni Mitchell
From: For the Roses (1972)
James Taylor had the pleasure of dating several exceptionally talented women, including both Simon and Mitchell. Like several musicians of his time, Taylor struggled with substance abuse as his fame rose, which Mitchell witnessed firsthand and wrote about in 1972’s “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” a troubling but also jazzy account of a lover’s descent into addiction — “Sparks fly up from sweet fire / Black soot of Lady Release / ‘Come with me, I know the way’ she says.”
Taylor knows the song is about him. “I’m not able to listen to it,” he told The Guardian in 2020.
5. “Diamonds & Rust,” Joan Baez
From: Diamonds & Rust (1975)
For many years, Joan Baez was better known for her interpretations of traditional folk songs. When she began releasing her original music, she proved to be an equally adept songwriter. In 1974, she was at work on a song about something else when she got a call from her old boyfriend Bob Dylan. “He read me the entire lyrics to ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,’ that he’d just finished from a phone booth in the Midwest,” Baez recalled to HuffPost in 2010. (That song would end up on Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks.) Baez swiftly shifted gears, crafting the title track to her own 1975 album Diamonds & Rust with lyrics about Dylan being “the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond.” “I don’t remember what I’d been writing about,” she said in 2010, “but it had nothing to do with what it ended up as.”
6. “Silver Springs,” Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac
From: 1976 Single
Not to pigeonhole her work, but Stevie Nicks is arguably the queen of writing songs like this — “Silver Springs” is just one of them. Nicks has never hidden the fact that the song, like others, was written about her relationship and breakup with Lindsey Buckingham. “‘I’m so angry with you. You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you,'” she said to The Arizona Republic in 1997, describing why she wrote it and what message she wanted to get across to Buckingham. That was the same year Fleetwood Mac reunited for an album and TV special both titled The Dance, in which Nicks could be seen staring a hole through Buckingham as the band performed “Silver Springs.” You’ll never get away from the sound of a woman that loved you.
7. “Barracuda,” Heart
From: Little Queen (1977)
Being a female rock ‘n’ roll artist in the ’70s presented challenges, as the sisters of Heart became all too familiar with them. At one point, someone at Mushroom Records, the label responsible for releasing Heart’s first two albums, had the extraordinarily stupid idea to create a publicity stunt of sorts that implied Ann and Nancy Wilson were involved in an incestuous relationship. When a radio promoter at a concert asked Ann how her “lover” was doing and she realized what he was referring to, she was livid. Her sister was too, and they ended up writing the fiery “Barracuda” as a response.
8. “Songbird,” Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac
From: Rumours (1977)
Stevie Nicks is not the only member of Fleetwood Mac to have written some remarkable songs about lost love. Christine McVie’s “Songbird” was written before her 1976 divorce from bassist John McVie, while Fleetwood Mac was touring no less. “I broke up with John in the middle of a tour. I was aware of it being rather irresponsible,” she told Rolling Stone in 1977. McVie never explicitly stated who the song was about, but the poignancy of lyrics like “I wish you all the love in the world, but most of all, I wish it from myself” speak for themselves. “When Christine played ‘Songbird,’ grown men would weep,” John McVie once said. “I did every night.”
9. “Talk of the Town,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders
From: Pretenders II (1981)
Some people assumed the Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town” was written about Ray Davies of the Kinks, who would later have a daughter with Chrissie Hynde in 1983 — “One thing leads to another I know / Was a time I wanted you for my mine.”
But actually, Hynde wrote it about a stranger. “I had in mind this kid who used to stand outside the soundchecks on our first tour,” she explained on the BBC Songwriters Circle program in 1999 (via Songfacts). “I never spoke to him. I remember that the last time I saw him I just left him standing in the snow, I never had anything to say to him. I kind of wrote this for him, so, in the unlikely event that you’re watching this, I did think about you.”
10. “You Oughta Know,” Alanis Morissette
From: Jagged Little Pill (1995)
Those who have been rumored to be the subject of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” include the actor Dave Coulier, hockey player Mike Peluso and actor Matt LeBlanc, plus others. But Morissette’s lips have been sealed since the song came out in 1995.
“Well, I’ve never talked about who my songs were about and I won’t, because when I write them they’re written for the sake of personal expression,” she said to the Vancouver Sun in 2008. “So with all due respect to whoever may see themselves in my songs, and it happens all the time, I never really comment on it because I write these songs for myself, not other people.”