When writer-producer David Hajdu was growing up, he was drawn to a mystical book on his mother’s shelf entitled Lives of the Saints. This was a collection of tales of Catholic saints and their heroic martyrdom. Later in life, Hajdu began to collect his own stories of ordinary individuals who, through their deeds, attained exalted status in his mind, essentially created his own canon of secular saints.

For his new recording, which borrows the same title, Lives of the Saints, Hajdu enlists an assemblage of first-tier composers and performers to tell the stories of ten remarkable people from history, all of whom happen to be women. Women who did extraordinary things but suffered in some ways for what did or what they believed.

The subjects of the song vary from the famous to the unknown, from ancient history to the recent past. Hajdu came to know Lena Horne well near the end of her life, as he interviewed and befriended her around the time he wrote a book on Billy Strayhorn. Hedy Lamarr was someone Hajdu had long wanted to write about. Hajdu and Douglas brainstormed together to hatch plans to write about Hypatia and Leonora Carrington. Johnson suggested a song about Ada Lovelace, who coincidentally, Hajdu had just studied and wrote about for a new book.