10 famous muses behind some of the greatest songs ever

This notion has produced songs that have cut Mick Jagger down to size, immortalised Courtney Love’s vagina, and made it clear to a thousand ex-lovers that getting back together is not an option. While there are no doubt millions of such tracks that we will never know about, sometimes keeping the muse secret is an impossible task—which is just as well, because it makes for interesting backstories.

Below we’ve compiled a list of classic tracks written about stars you know well. From send-ups to Don McLean to a trip down love’s memory lane with Bob Dylan, these are stories of the figures behind some of the greatest songs ever written.

10 famous muses behind some of the greatest songs ever written:

‘A Case of You’ – Joni Mitchell (about Graham Nash)

When Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s Laurel Canyon home was beset by a rising aura of discontent, artistry flourished. “She touched my heart and soul in a way that they had never been touched before,” Nash said about Mitchell, going on to even eulogise her break-up record Blue, about which he said: “I watched her write some of those songs and I believe that one or two of them were about me.”

After all, how could Nash not be impressed by ‘A Case of You’? The intro to ‘A Case of You’ is a moment of such brilliance that I am more than happy to assert that it is one of the ten greatest opening verses without any due forethought regarding the gilded list that it would be contained within. The song exhibits a sort of irascible wit that makes you pity Nash who was on the receiving end of such cutting jibes during their parting, and yet, as ever with Joni, it retains a dignified air and wisdom.

She loved Nash by her own admission, but she just couldn’t help but think that his desires for marriage and civility meant being locked away. As her lyrics illuminate: “Just before our love got lost, you said ‘I am as constant as a northern star’, and I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness, where’s that at?’ If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.”

‘Dreams’ – Fleetwood Mac (written by Stevie Nicks about Lindsey Buckingham)

On a particularly bleak and lonely-sounding evening, Stevie Nicks sat behind the piano in Sly Stone’s house and poured her heart out about breaking up with her bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham. She knew she had written a gem. She was also aware that the barebones song she had written could only be transfigured from a humble heartbroken offering by the same man she painstakingly wrote it about.

Likewise, Buckingham could be under no illusions that the song itself was about him. So, picture if you will, the moment the three-part vocals had to be recorded: in a silent, darkened, studio room stood Nicks, Christine McVie – who was also going through a divorce – and Lindsey huddled inches apart around the same microphone and crooning their heartaches into it, no doubt in that very moment the heartache was being added to – frankly, it’s hard to imagine a performance under any more emotional duress. 

The result encapsulates everything that was happening — all the wrung-out heartache, the comic silver-lining of tragedy – and in its own mad way, it is a total expression of love… and portent that sometimes it might be better if your muse is not quite so inescapable.

‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ – Leonard Cohen (about Janis Joplin)

Amid the unfurling poetry, jazzed-up arrangements, and dry production of New Skin For The Old Ceremony is a line that holds weight like no other: “Well, never mind, we are ugly, but we have the music,” whether it is a direct quote from Janis Joplin, as Leonard Cohen’s tale surrounding the song seems to suggest, will never really be known. But what is undoubted is that it delineated the backbone of Cohen’s work and a fair chunk of the post-counterculture notion of alternative art, of which Joplin was a flower-power symbol.

Cohen would later come to regret revealing that this explicit track was about Joplin. In a BBC broadcast he said his disclosure regarding the backstory was “an indiscretion for which I’m very sorry, and if there is some way of apologising to the ghost, I want to apologise now, for having committed that indiscretion.”

While the candid nature of the lyrics might have been something Joplin wanted to keep private, the sheer beauty on display is something that she would have happily proclaimed herself.

‘Like a Rolling Stone’ – Bob Dylan (about Edie Sedgewick)

When Edie Sedgwick’s ancestors arrived in America they were among the richest and most powerful to come ashore. Sadly, childhood was far from easy for her so, in 1964, when she received an $80,000 trust fund from her grandmother, she decided to disavow the conventional route of aristocracy and ventured to the bohemian hub of New York City’s ‘Greenwich Village. It was here that she met Andy Warhol and became a central figure in his Factory scene.

As fame followed her appearances in Warhol’s short films, she became something of a proto ‘influencer’. Her outfits at Factory parties were scrutinised by the press and all the other trappings and pitfalls associated with the modern equivalent beset her. It was during this period that she reportedly developed a crush on Bob Dylan.

While there are plenty of rumours and very little corroborating evidence for the pair being more than being figures who occupied the same circles, it isn’t much of a leap to say that Dylan’s defining anthem ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ may well have been penned about her. From the colonial context of her ancestry to the simple notion of a fall from grace in a spiritual sense as her addictions took hold, it is all wrought out in his blistering tune that held a mirror to counterculture.

‘The Whole of the Moon’ – The Waterboys (about Prince)

So the story goes, The Waterboys’ soaring classic ‘The Whole of the Moon’ was written in honour of Prince. The reason he was heralded as the impetus behind the rafter-rattling epic was because of the transcendent way that he approached his art—in a sense, where other artists might be content to invent the musical wheel, after packing away their tools and cracking open a cider, Prince would gleefully sail by them on a sonic bicycle. The little Purple One looked at the world differently and he applied these rose-tinted eyes to his work.

The theory that the song was about Prince also stemmed from the message on the record’s label which Waterboys songwriter Mike Scott penned reading: “For Prince, U saw the whole of the moon”, utilising the guitar God’s penchant for abbreviating words down to the Nokia days of text talk.

Scott channelled these rarefied trailblazers into his own epic which remains one of the finest songs of the ‘80s, if not all time. With trumpet sections inspired by the flugelhorns of ‘Penny Lane’ which Scott described poetically as sounding “like sunlight bursting through clouds,” the track is an elegy to the exultant power of art and the new eyes it can inspire you to view the world with.

‘Ms Jackson’ – Outkast (about Erykah Badu)

The most brutal thing about a break-up is often that you lose a lot more people than merely the one you’re saying farewell to. Andre 3000 wanted to cushion that blow by offering a heartfelt apology to Erykah Badu’s mother he split from the R&B star.

“It hit kind of a sore spot,” Badu recalled on the Rap Radar podcast. “I didn’t wanna hear that, especially when I heard Big Boi’s verse. When I heard Andre’s verse, I felt very good because his verse was really, really inspiring. He just said how he felt and it was his honest feelings and I always respected that and listened to what he felt and appreciated it.”

As for her mother, Badu added: “How did my mama feel? Baby, she bought herself a ‘Ms. Jackson’ licence plate, she had the mug, she had the ink pen, she had the headband, everything. That’s who loved it.” And therein lies the beauty not only of this indelible anthem, but Outkast in general: they always bring a level of alleviating fun to everything.

‘Killing Me Softly’ – Roberta Flack (written by Lori Lieberman about Don McLean)

In 1971, Lori Lieberman went with her friend Michele Willens to see Don McLean perform at the Troubadour. While the audience awaited ‘American Pie’ which was fresh in the charts, Lieberman felt sideswiped by his stunning performance of ‘Empty Chairs’. As he stirred her soul with his arresting performance, she began scribbling notes on a napkin.

After the concert, she raced to a phonebooth, called her songwriting partner Norman Gimbel and relayed her napkin’s musical eulogy to a performer putting their all into a piece of music. This inspiration would later be relayed to Roberta Flack who looked to replicate that sense of sincere humbling in her own version.

McLean would later learn of the connection in 1973 and commented: “I’m absolutely amazed. I’ve heard both Lori’s and Roberta’s version and I must say I’m very humbled about the whole thing. You can’t help but feel that way about a song written and performed as well as this one is.”

‘Hearts and Bones’ – Paul Simon (about Carrie Fisher)

Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher were more off-again-on-again than a sitcom couple. This relationship was defined beautifully in Simon’s masterful ode to Fisher with ‘Hearts and Bones’, an anthem which he describes as “a better song” than ‘The Sound of Silence’. With wedding vows on his mind, he wrote: “Two people were married, the act was outrageous, the bride was contagious.” In an interview with Paul Zollo, he later reflected, “That was one of my best songs. It took a long time to write it, and it was very true. It was about things that happened. The characters are very near to autobiographical. It’s probably the only track that I really like on that album.”

In the end, we are left with a track of honeyed belle that seems to prognosticate the bittersweet arc of their love affair very clearly. Thus, despite the prickly pastures, it stands within, it is a patch of beauty that remains untouched by torment. As Fisher would remark in an interview in 2016, shortly before her passing, “I do like the songs he wrote about our relationship. Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much.”

Very few sentiments could be as befitting of their relationship as that, and no song in Simon’s back catalogue delineates that with as much clarity as ‘Hearts and Bones’. It is an account of their love run through the fictional filter of mellowed nostalgia.

‘Our House’ – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (written by Graham Nash about Joni Mitchell)

In the inversion of the track that started this list, Graham Nash wrote Joni Mitchell a sanguine song about the joys of settling into comfortable “domestic bliss”. As he told NPR: “Well, it’s an ordinary moment. What happened is that Joni and I [were] on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley; there’s a very famous deli called Art’s Deli. And we’d been to breakfast there. We’re going to get into Joan’s car, and we pass an antique store. And we’re looking in the window, and she saw a very beautiful vase that she wanted to buy. I persuaded her to buy this vase. It wasn’t very expensive, and we took it home.”

He continued: “And [when] we got to the house in Laurel Canyon, I said, ‘you know what? I’ll light a fire. Why don’t you put some flowers in that vase that you just bought?’” That note of casual conversation would later be echoed in the peaceful little song.

While Mitchell was in the garden plucking flowers, he sat behind their piano and let inspiration flow through him. “An hour later, ‘Our House’ was born,” he said, “out of an incredibly ordinary moment that many, many people have experienced.”

‘Diamonds and Rust – Joan Baez (about Bob Dylan)

Joan Baez took Bob Dylan under her wing when he first arrived on the folk scene and soon, they were crowned the king and queen of the movement. They fell in love and headed out on the road. This would come with its own issues. In Dylan’s own words: “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, and unfortunately, she got swept up along, and I felt very bad about it, I was sorry to ever see our relationship ever end.”

Circumstance may have plonked a full stop at the end of their sentence but pitted along the way were poetic moments of pure pillow-propped content that would live on beyond the wiles of life’s whims. As Baez once wrote: “Maybe that afternoon was the closest I ever felt to Bob: his eyes were as old as God, and he was fragile as a winter leaf.” This very notion is what makes ‘Diamonds and Rust’ soar amid the pantheon of odes and breakup pines that music has offered up. Dylan later admitted: “I love that song ‘Diamonds and Rust’, to be included in something that Joaney had written, I mean to this day it still impresses me.”

If the pair embodied that folk is about timeless universality, then the pastiche that Baez paints with her stirring epic is something that transcends the specificity contained within and arrives at the sort of allegory that anyone can connect with—even behind a tree long since felled the grass remains greener. Perhaps that is why the beauty of the pipe and slippers opus has only blossomed since it was released, even if it did somehow inexplicably fail to chart in the top 30 originally.

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