Inside The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

A very interesting read, if I must say. You can read it all here.

Things that stood out to me:

Lauryn Hill: [I wanted to] write songs that lyrically move me and have the integrity of reggae and the knock of hip-hop and the instrumentation of classic soul. [My engineer and I worked on] a sound that's raw. I like the rawness of you being able to hear the scratch in the vocals. I don't ever want that taken away. I don't like to use compressors and take away my textures, because I was raised on music that was recorded before technology advanced to the place where it could be smooth. I wanna hear that thickness of sound. You can't get that from a computer, because a computer's too perfect. But that human element, that's what makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I love that.

Nobles: There was a female group called Ex Factor signed to Arista and we did a song called "Ex Factor" for them. And then we started working on a song called "Loved Real Hard Once" — the title got switched [to "When It Hurts So Bad."] Those were the first two records that we worked on. We were making songs for other people and the songs started becoming too personal and we were like, wait a minute, this is your story. We were having a conversation about her relationship in the little studio in her attic in South Orange, and that's how "I Used to Love Him" came about. It was about 'Clef.

John Legend: I was in the spring of my junior year at University of Pennsylvania. A friend invited me to give her a ride to Lauryn's house in Jersey. Lauryn was working "Everything Is Everything." I sang and played a couple songs for her. She asked me to play piano on the track. She guided me a little bit but it was pretty simple because I was playing along with a string part that was already there. I became known around campus as the dude who played on "Everything Is Everything." It was my little claim to fame at Penn for my whole senior year.

Commissioner Gordon: "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" was never meant to be a commercial single. It was originally recorded for [the soundtrack for the movie] Conspiracy Theory and ended up on the radio, became popular, and that's how it ended became a bonus track. She called me and said she was behind and had to get it done. She didn't know how the arrangement of the song went, so we went and got a copy from Coconuts or Sam Goody. I had a little one-room 16-track studio in my apartment in Jersey. Lauryn was eight months pregnant, laying on her back on the floor, half asleep, holding a handheld mike. She did all of those vocals off the top of her head pretty much in one take, with the beat box and all of that. That blew me away.

Legend: Lauryn had that blend of toughness and soulfulness, melody and swagger. She did it better than anybody still has done it. People are still trying to capture that moment. Jazmine Sullivan's song that's out now ["Need U Bad"] sounds eerily similar to Lauryn.