A Woman's Worth - Alicia Keys

"A Woman's Worth" was Alicia Keys' second single, after "Fallin'." She wrote it about self-esteem, and being worthy of the kindness of others. The sentiment can relate to a man or a woman, but the lyric is specifically for the ladies.

When asked what inspired her to write the song, she replied: "I was actually in someone's house for Thanksgiving and I was watching TV. All these different commercials came on. There was this one commercial that said 'Because I'm Worth It.' And you know what - I AM worth it."

All About That Bass - Meghan Trainor

Not since the Spinal Tap song "Big Bottom" has such an analog been made between the low end of the audio spectrum and the rear end of a woman. Unlike the Spinal Tap song, however, Trainor is celebrating her own posterior in this track, making it a song about confidence and positive body image.

She wrote the song with Kevin Kadish, who had the title "All About That Bass" written in his notebook when he and Trainor started their songwriting session. Kadish always envisioned that title as a song about booty, but he figured it would be good for a male hip-hop artist - a club tune about looking for a woman with a good low end. When he mentioned the title to Trainor, however, she loved it, since she often used the phrase "I'm all about that ____" to indicate something she liked (e.g., "I'm all about that Chris Hemsworth," "I'm all about that burrito").

When Kadish said the title, Trainor came up with "I'm all about that bass," and Kadish added the rejoinder, "no treble." This got them started on the song, which they wrote from a female perspective with the bass as a metaphor for her proud booty. "Once we started writing it, I remember his smile when he said 'skinny bitches,'" Trainor told Entertainment Weekly. "That's when we looked at each other like, 'We'll never make a dime off this, but I'm fine with that.'"

Express Yourself - Madonna

The song is one of female empowerment, urging women never to "go for second-best." Madonna explained (as quoted in the book, Madonna 'talking': Madonna in Her Own Words): "The ultimate thing behind the song is that if you don't express yourself, if you don't say what you want, then you're not going to get it. And in effect you are chained down by your inability to say what you feel or go after what you want."

It has a surprising inspiration. In 1986, Jennifer Grey started dating her fellow actor Matthew Broderick after they met on the set of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. They went out together for over three years until she left Broderick for Johnny Depp. At the time, Grey was close friends with Madonna, and according to the Dirty Dancing actress, the Queen of Pop penned "Express Yourself" about her love life.

"She told me she wrote 'Express Yourself' about me breaking up with Matthew," Grey recalled to People of the first time she heard the song. "She played it for me in her car. I was in my log cabin with Johnny and she said, 'Come into my car.' And I got in her Mercedes where she had a really good sound system and she was like, 'Listen to this song I just did. It's about you.'"

Girl On Fire - Alicia Keys

She's just a girl, but she's on fire...

Alicia Keys told the audience at her 2012 Manchester Cathedral concert the song is about "really letting go of anything that's holding you back. Following your light. Following your passion. That puts you on fire."

The song is the title track and first single from Keys' fifth studio album, released in 2012. She was just 30 years old, but had already logged over a decade in the industry, having released her debut album, Songs in A Minor, when she was 20. Signed to Clive Davis' mighty J label, she was carefully managed. This song finds her liberated.

Said Keys: "Before making this record, in some ways I felt like a lion locked in a cage. I felt like a girl misunderstood that no one really knew, I felt like it was time to stop making excuses for any part of my life that I wanted to change. Once I made that choice I became a Girl on Fire, the lion broke free!!"

I Am Woman - Helen Reddy

Helen Reddy wrote this when she couldn't find enough songs to include on her first album, I Don't Know How To Love Him. She was looking for songs that reflected a positive self-image that she felt she had gained from her participation in the women's liberation movement.

Included on the 1971 album, Reddy didn't like the way this version came out and neither did her producer, Larry Marks (he thought she sounded "too butch"), but they put it on the album anyway. Another producer did like it. Movie producer Mike Frankovitch wanted to use it in his "feminist comedy" Stand Up And Be Counted. Reddy agreed on two conditions: That she would re-record the song, and that he would donate $1000 each to Women's Centers in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

To coincide with the movie's release, the song was issued as a single in 1972, which slowly rose to #1 in America. Reddy's second album was subsequently titled I Am Woman and included this new version of the song.

I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor

This female-empowerment anthem is about moving on after a bad relationship. Over the years, it has taken on meaning for people who have overcome just about any difficult situation, but for the song's lyricist, Dino Fekaris, it was about getting fired by Motown Records, where he was a staff writer. Says Fekaris: "They let me go after almost seven years. I was an unemployed songwriter contemplating my fate. I turned the TV on, and there it was: a song I had written for a movie theme titled Generation was playing right then (the song was performed by Rare Earth). I took that as an omen that things were going to work out for me. I remember jumping up and down on the bed saying, 'I'm going to make it. I'm going to be a songwriter. I will survive!"

Gloria Gaynor sees this song as just a simple song about survival, regardless of what you have to overcome. She said: "I love the empowering effect, I love the encouraging effect. It's a timeless lyric that addresses a timeless concern."

I'm Every Woman - Chaka Khan

This song is about a strong woman who takes very good care of her man, supporting him and making him a better person. It was written by the husband and wife team of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who as Ashford & Simpson, had a hit in 1984 with "Solid."

Surprisingly, it was Nick Ashford who wrote the lyric. "The whole woman thing took a long time to come through," he explained in the Billboard Book of #1 Hits. "It's hard when you have to assume the role of the woman."

The song is a great showcase for Chaka Khan's powerhouse vocals. The chords on the song were copied over from the ones Valerie Simpson came up with and put on the demo, but Chaka put her own spin on the vocal, stretching out the title line in the chorus to really make it resound. It's one of her signature songs, a favorite among the Chakaholics.

Independent Women Part I - Destiny's Child

The biggest hit of 2000, this song followed the winning formula of accessible hip-hop/dance attached to a blockbuster movie. In the late '90s, this was the forte of Will Smith, who did it with "Men In Black" (1997) and "Wild Wild West" (1999).

"Independent Women" was featured in the movie Charlie's Angels; the stars of the film, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu, are mentioned in the song.

Beyoncé came up with the song for her group Destiny's Child after having an argument with her boyfriend. She thought to herself, "I don't need a man, I'm independent," and with that went into a studio on her own and recorded vocals for the first version of this song, which promoted female independence, both financially and relationally. A team of producers - Eric Seats, Rapture Stewart, David Donaldson - put the track together using a sample from the Peabody's Improbable History theme song. This version was later used on the 2001 Destiny's Child album Survivor as "Independent Women Part II," but a radically different rendition became the hit.

Man! I Feel Like a Woman! - Shania Twain

Shania Twain wrote this ode to her feminine side with her producer husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange. She originally wrote it as a message of encouragement to herself, but the song then transformed into a celebration of her transition into womanhood. Speaking with Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest, Twain explained that she grew up in Canada as a tomboy, and once she started getting curves, it took her a long while to accept her womanly body.

"The inspiration was, I started to appreciate the fact that I can really have fun being a woman," she said of the song's meaning. "I didn't realize it would have so much impact on others and that so many other people related to this."

Never - Heart

"Never" is an empowerment song with a very vague storyline but a seriously catchy chorus. Speaking with Songfacts, its co-writer Holly Knight said: "It feels like that was my theme, and I think it all came out of the fact that I was not going to take s--t from anybody after what I'd been through in the early part of my life."

Heart was dropped by Epic Records after their 1983 album Passionworks. They signed with Capitol, which teamed them with producer Ron Nevison and insisted they use songs written by outside writers. The plan worked. The Heart album contained three Top 10 hits: "What About Love," "Never" and "These Dreams."

Respect - Aretha Franklin

Otis Redding wrote this song and originally recorded it in 1965, with his version hitting #35 in the US. Redding said of the song shortly before his death in 1967: "That's one of my favorite songs because it has a better groove than any of my records. It says something, too: 'What you want, baby, you got it; what you need, baby, you got it; all I'm asking for is a little respect when I come home.' The song lines are great. The band track is beautiful. It took me a whole day to write it and about twenty minutes to arrange it. We cut it once and that was it. Everybody wants respect, you know."

Redding's version consisted of only verses - no chorus or bridge. Aretha Franklin appropriated King Curtis' sax solo from Sam & Dave's "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby," which he recorded the previous night for Stax Records, and used that for the bridge.

It was Aretha's idea to cover the song. She came up with the arrangement, added the "sock it to me" lines, and played piano on the track. Her sister Carolyn, who sang backup on the album, also helped work up the song.

Roar - Katy Perry

The song is a bouncy statement by Perry of moving forward into the next stage of her life after the tumultuous end of her marriage to Russell Brand. Talking to BBC Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills, she revealed: "It's a bit of a self-empowering type of song. I wrote it because I was sick of keeping all these feelings inside and not speaking up for myself, which caused a lot of resentment. Obviously I've been through a lot of therapy since my last record and that's what this is about."

Four words that Sylvester Stallone came up with in the early '80s permeated pop culture through the decades, landing (in very derivative fashion) in this song. When Perry sings about having the "eye of the tiger," it's a mantra of courage and determination that Stallone's character, Rocky Balboa, used in the 1982 movie Rocky III to defeat Mr. T's character Clubber Lang. Stallone saw the youth appeal in the phrase, and asked the band Survivor to write a song around the title. The first two Rocky movies were aimed at adults, but this third one, with a fresh, contemporary theme song, gained a whole new audience primed by MTV.

Perry's use of the phrase goes with the big-cat theme of her song, and falls under fair use; the "Eye Of The Tiger" songwriters did not get writer's credits on "Roar." This isn't the first time Perry has appropriated a distinctive hook line from a hit song - in 2010 she released "California Gurls."

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves - Eurythmics

Annie Lennox, Aretha Franklin and The Charles Williams Gospel Choir share the vocals on this modern feminist anthem that Lennox put together with help from her bandmate, Dave Stewart.

Lennox explained in a 1991 interview with Q: "'Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves was a challenge, to write a pop song that could be played on the radio yet was a feminist anthem. I woke up one morning and wrote all the words. I had a vision of it, and said to Dave that this idea needs a fantastic woman to sing it with. I'd thought of Tina Turner, and we contacted her but she found the content too feminist. But Aretha Franklin wanted to do it, and we flew to Detroit. I got along all right with her but we didn't have an immediate rapport. Aretha struck me as rather shy, a bit sad, a bit lonely. She had an entourage which I thought a bit eccentric - I wasn't used to it."

So What - Pink

This song was co-written by and produced by Max Martin, who was behind the artist's prior hits "Who Knew" and "U And Ur Hand."

Pink told the story of this song: "'So What' was a joke. I heard this beat from Max Martin. It's such a fun beat, so fun. And I was actually kidding when I said, 'I guess I just lost my husband, I don't know where he went.' Ha ha, that's really funny. Let's keep it and it just kind of went from there. And it just got more and more wrong. The more lines we wrote, the wronger it was. And we kept it because I don't really care. I don't think about the consequences when I write songs and now I am regretting every second of it. No, I'm not."

April 16, 2025

Further Reading:

Interview with Holly Knight ("The Best," "Love Is A Battlefield")
The "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover" Story
Songs About Confidence or Courage

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