We often assume that any artifact or relic sealed behind museum glass is impossibly distant from the present, an immutable piece of antiquity forever suspended in the past. Although interesting from an archival perspective, these objects have little to do with our everyday experiences. In fact, we're likely to forget all about them soon after. But history tells us otherwise. History introduces us to the context and circumstances that often aren't apparent in the objects themselves. Through this, we come to understand that the dusty museum pieces we view as amusing oddities are actually the pillars upon which modernity has been built. Music is the same way. Casual listeners tend to view old songs as quaint and nostalgic, using them to superficially travel to a supposedly simpler time without thinking about the complexities of the cultural moment from which they arose or the multifaceted ways in which they are continually re-contextualized.

With this mix, I wanted to trace the ripples of the female singer-songwriter tradition back to their origins, but by treating them as alive, invigorating, and potent rather than the mere seeds from which more exciting flowers burst forth. Keeping in mind that my knowledge of musical history is far from exhaustive, it's as much a way to showcase some bad-ass women as it is to kick-start further exploration. In the end, my goal was to frame originals and echoes as equals in a way that transcends chronology and emphasizes continual coexistence in a ceaseless cycle of invention, influence, and reinvention. If none of this makes sense conceptually, I hope it is at least enjoyable aesthetically. (As usual, the Spotify playlist, bar one unavailable song, appears below my endless rambling.)

1. Hurray for the Riff Raff - Living in the City


In the tradition of folk storytelling, "Living in the City" paints a vivid picture of a shabby Puerto Rican neighborhood populated by characters whose defining qualities are distilled into single lines: "Big Danny is wasted," "Mariposa's singing love songs," "Gypsy bit the dust." The resulting effect is like a film's opening credits, a warp-speed collage of small moments building up to something grander, a celebration of the complication and confusion and humanness of an entire city "standing on the roof tops" and "yelling till the morning." Alynda Segarra's nuanced vocal inflections sell the song's emotion, taking a page from the playbooks of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, whose words were always as important as the way they were embodied.

2. Joni Mitchell - Free Man in Paris


I doubt many artists working today can't trace their inspiration back to Joni Mitchell; her influence is as ubiquitous as the Beatles' or Dylan's, but she receives less credit. While perhaps not as seminal as the acoustic purity that preceded it or the challenging experimentation that followed, "Free Man in Paris" is a favorite for me because it's just so catchy. Over sunny guitars, Mitchell places herself in the shoes of music promoter and agent David Geffen, and I may be reading too much into them, but the lyrics seem to hold both admiration and contempt. Even as she envies his ability to become so easily "unfettered and alive," she is quietly critical of his privileged position "stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song."

3. Tracy Chapman - Why?


In 2017, the above lyrics may come off as simplistic or trite; in 1988, I expect they seemed more revolutionary, particularly coming from a young black woman with an acoustic guitar and a wise, gentle voice. Even now, it's hard to fault their directness when the message is still, unfortunately, very relevant. Beyond "Fast Car," I didn't hear Tracy Chapman until after I decided to start putting this mix together, but I knew immediately that she deserved a place. Chapman took the genres of folk and country, predominantly white in popular perception, and reoriented them to her own experiences as a woman of color. "Why?" is a demand to be heard, even (especially) in a culture that so frequently undermines the voices of its oppressed.

4. Laura Marling - Undine


Around her third album, A Creature I Don't Know, Laura Marling began shifting away from a more ornate English folk sensibility to a style more indebted to the effortless, bohemian Laurel Canyon sound of the '60s and '70s. Subsequent releases, Once I Was an Eagle and Short Movie, leaned even further in this direction, likely owing to Marling's brief relocation from London to Silver Lake, California. "Undine" comes from the former, a lilting and sprightly folk fairy tale about a woman who falls in love with a bewitching water nymph. In her low, rough-and-tumble accent, Marling sets the doomed infatuation to percussive acoustic guitar strums, which build like a crackling fire to a mournful realization: "Undine, you live for the sea/You cannot love me."

5. Paula Cole - Tiger


This song's lyrics seem torn from a rebellious teen girl's diary; its vocals, on the other hand, are ripped from the throat of a ferocious and confident woman. It's a jarring yet intentional dichotomy meant to mimic the immense, explosive release felt in the moment of breaking free from years of suppression caused by the societal trappings of gender. "No more sex-starved teachers trying to touch my ass," Cole snarls over rumbling piano and dark, propulsive drums, "I can finally be a teenager at age twenty-six." In the song's final minute, her raw, wordless vocalizations are the sound of unguarded and unapologetic liberation, the roaring of a pure animal being who refuses to be locked back into her cage.

6. Laura Nyro - Tom Cat Goodby


It may be an exaggeration to say that Laura Nyro single-handedly created the confessional-girl-at-a-piano genre but not by much. In 1969, at only twenty-two years old, she released New York Tendaberry, from which the bizarre, incendiary vocal stylings of women like Kate Bush and Paula Cole can be directly traced. Hell, it's essentially the blueprint for Tori Amos' Boys for Pele, released more than twenty-five years earlier. Passionate, shocking, and breathless, "Tom Cat Goodby" captures Nyro at the top of her game. Across a dizzying number of melodic permutations, she sings rapturously about murdering her adulterous lover and pounds furiously at the piano, as though her own life depends upon it.

7. Kate Bush - The Wedding List


Singing without remorse about killing a cheating lover in 1969 was probably a touch unusual; singing a jaunty pop song about seeking revenge against the man who shot your husband on your wedding day was probably similarly out of the ordinary ten years later. Can you imagine witnessing Kate Bush's dramatic lip-sync reenactment of this song's events as it unfolded on television for the first time? When she released Never for Ever, the album upon which this song appears and her first true masterpiece, Bush was the same age as Nyro, making her fearlessness and creativity all the more staggering. The album's wide-eyed, exploratory weirdness, like a girl playing dress-up with her mother's clothes for the first time, is wildly charming.

8. Perfume Genius - Wreath


While I wanted to primarily emphasize the contributions of women, which are too often overshadowed by those of men, the influence of performers like Kate Bush and Tori Amos on many gay male singer-songwriters today cannot be overstated. Perfume Genius' recently-released No Shape is, in spirit, the most Bush-esque thing I've heard in years while belonging entirely to itself in sound. On "Wreath," Mike Hadreas not only inhabits a surreal technicolor soundscape indebted to Bush's weirdest album, The Dreaming, but directly references her biggest hit, "Running Up That Hill." With quavering conviction, Hadreas struggles against the uncomfortable confines imposed upon his body and sexuality by both society and self.

9. Lorde - Writer in the Dark


Weird and subversive pop music doesn't always have to exist on the fringes. In 1978, Kate Bush topped the UK charts with "Wuthering Heights," a creepily possessive retelling of a classic novel sung entirely in a banshee-like shriek. A more contemporary example is Lorde, whose 2013 breakthrough "Royals" sounded nothing like its radio contemporaries but blasted up the Billboard Hot 100 anyway. Like Bush, Lorde needed to prove with her second album that she's more than a teenage wunderkind, and Melodrama delivers in spades. The brooding and ominous "Writer in the Dark" is a piano ballad that builds on the lineage of Bush and Amos in its abrupt melodic twists and raw, impassioned vocal harmonies.

10. Tori Amos - Siren


I've always thought this deserved to be more than a random soundtrack song, but it wouldn't fully fit into any of Tori Amos' albums either. A tightly-constructed pop maelstrom, it somehow takes advantage of Amos' free-form, impressionistic vocal meanderings while simultaneously reigning them in, turning her outbursts of syllabic glossolalia into ritualistic melodies that push constantly forward. With its thunderous looping piano motif and balmy percussive atmospherics, it bridges the gap chronologically and stylistically between the improvised intensity of Boys for Pele and the dark, cool electronics of From the Choirgirl Hotel. The flashes of collage-like imagery, enigmatic yet evocative, further contribute to the sense of urgency.

11. Bat for Lashes - Laura


Even though the songwriting is fairly straightforward, "Laura" is probably one of my very favorite songs. It's a brooding, sparse piano ballad with a touch of theatricality, which are a dime a dozen by now, so to do something so simple in a way that still feels timeless and novel is impressive. The subdued, slow-burning nature of the track reminds me of early Tori Amos gems like "Mother" and "Yes, Anastasia" but more streamlined and sensual. Natasha Khan's rich, throaty voice is gorgeously understated, straining with emotion every time she repeats the title line. "You're the train that crashed my heart/You're the glitter in the dark," she forcefully insists, imbuing a drunken after-party pep talk to a girlfriend with the gravity of revelation.

12. Nadine Shah - Big Hands


One night, a month or two ago, I was listening to my Spotify library (which is primarily composed of albums I want to hear but haven't gotten around to yet) on shuffle and this song stopped me dead in my tracks. I had to play it four or five times in a row before moving on. It's a lot like "Laura" in its glimmering, sultry cinematic spread, and Nadine Shah and Natasha Khan even share a similar velvety vocal tone. But there's something singular about it, too, particularly in the way it expertly builds into a complex, layered gut punch of a climax. The lyrics are non-specific enough to be ambiguous in meaning, but the chorus especially seems to hint darkly at domestic abuse and more broadly the god complex that turns men into monsters.

13. Mary Margaret O'Hara - Body's in Trouble


Mary Margaret O'Hara is one of music's biggest enigmas. In 1988, she released a bizarre and wonderful abstract pop album entitled Miss America that failed to take off like it deserved. She hasn't exactly gone into hiding since, having kept busy with film scoring, acting, and contributing background vocals for friends, but she's also expressed seemingly no interest in releasing a proper follow-up. You can't fault her, though: the particular magic of Miss America, which has steadily gained a small cult following, would be difficult to recapture. Across this song's five minutes, O'Hara's voice is a writhing, tempestuous creature that refuses to remain still, instead cooing and moaning seductively atop a minimal and angular '80s rock backdrop.

14. CocoRosie - Child Bride


CocoRosie's earliest recordings were lo-fi folk songs constructed from sampled children's toys, affectedly girlish vocals, and grimy lyrics about delinquents, outcasts, and vagabonds. Their more recent work polishes the rough edges of these qualities, while incorporating electronic and hip-hop influences. None of it sounds like it should work, but more often than not, it does. Here, creeping piano and pulsating programmed drums provide the backdrop for Bianca Casady's naively emotive drawl, which is disarmingly suited to the song's subject matter. "The man with the black hat will take me home tonight/I wash my body, five years grown," she warbles above the ghostly atmosphere provided by her sister Sierra's operatic wail.

15. Linda Perhacs - Parallelograms

Linda Perhacs doesn't exactly sing the phone book in "Parallelograms," but she does center an entire song on the light, playful intonation of the names of geometric shapes, which also requires insane vocal charisma to pull off. Luckily, Perhacs has it. Although slight, her winsome croon lulls the listener into serenity - that is, until the song abruptly switches gears two minutes in, transforming into an abstract minimalist tone poem. A minute and a half later, it fades once more into unassuming folk like the return to dream from a brief but vivid nightmare. It's a genius combination of tradition and innovation that went unappreciated in its time but would be rediscovered and imitated by an entire folk movement more than thirty years later.

16. Joanna Newsom - Divers (not on Spotify)


I would go so far as to say this song exists in a world beyond ours entirely. Joanna Newsom's voice has never held more depth, her lyrics have never been more evocative, and, together with the hypnotic confluence of harp, piano, and mellotron, they stir deep but unnameable emotions. For seven minutes, I have the closest thing to an out-of-body experience I've ever known. Newsom is as indebted to her forebears as any singer-songwriter of her generation, but she internalizes their influence in a way that completely reinvents it. The most gripping imagery occurs at the song's climax: "I dream it every night/The ringing of the pail/The motes of sand dislodged/The shucking, quick and bright/The twinned and cast-off shells reveal a single heart of white."
17. Parenthetical Girls - Oh Daughter/Disaster


Parenthetical Girls is an outlet for Zac Pennington's gender non-conformity and his interest in exploring more feminine perspectives, which presumably takes root in his admiration of artists like Bush and Amos, whom he has covered and emulated. On Safe as Houses, a painful concept album about the complicated, trauma-filled relationship between a mother and daughter, their inspiration is apparent in his warbling vocal delivery, vividly potent lyrics, and mercurial song structures. Amidst the cacophonous swelling of strings, synthesizer, and glockenspiel, Pennington's unorthodox voice is as wearied as the mother he embodies, who mourns her daughter's suicide: "Oh my daughter/Life rushed from you/And split in ways you weren't meant to."

18. Fiona Apple - Sullen Girl


Many of these women rose to prominence possessing a talent beyond their years, and Fiona Apple is no exception. She was just nineteen when she released her debut, Tidal, and wrote the bulk of its songs at sixteen, which explains why it feels so close and intimate. "Sullen Girl" in particular stings like an open wound. A brutal account of the aftermath of Apple's sexual violation as a young teenager, its soothing vocals and languid piano-playing go down easy, but the words cut deep. She's called "sullen" in an off-handed, dismissive way by those who know nothing of her real pain, which she can only dull by plunging into willful ignorance. "It's calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion," she repeats with increasing insistence, like a desperate mantra.

19. Antony and the Johnsons - For Today I Am a Boy


Although Anohni hadn't yet publicly changed her name or revealed that she was a transgender woman at the time of its release, I Am a Bird Now is a frank and gripping document of gender identity exploration, remarkably human in its ugliness and beauty, its complexity and contradiction. "For Today I Am a Boy" is constructed as a tug-of-war, its simple, repetitive lyrics sounding alternately like hopeful anticipation for a future in which the narrator can finally be her true self and weary resignation toward her present state. Even the music imitates this sense of emotional whiplash, with Anohni's swelling voice and dramatic piano chords rising and falling in messy, discordant tandem.

20. Nina Simone - I Put a Spell on You


In many ways, Nina Simone is the woman who started it all. I hear the echoes of her rich, soulful vocals, which cracked and rasped as often as they soared, in the quavering, heart-on-sleeve delivery of Fiona Apple and Anohni and the impressions of her weighty, intense piano-playing in pretty much every singer-songwriter who's touched the instrument after her. While "I Put a Spell on You" may not be the greatest representation of her many talents, being a fairly conventionally-interpreted standard, it somehow just fits as a closer. Amid an ornate arrangement of strings, piano, and saxophone, Simone's voice easily outdoes them all, imbuing the simple lyrics with impossible power and passion.