Inside "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill"

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.

Commissioner Gordon: My wife, Suzette, signed Lauryn as a songwriter and said, "Lauryn wants talk to you about doing a solo record." Lauryn said, "I want you to be my co-pilot." The recording took about a year and a half. Sony never wanted her to make a solo record; they wanted her to make another Fugees record.

Marley: Lauryn and her mom took [early versions of] her album to Sony Records and they said, "This is coffee table music. What is this shit? Coffee table music." She took her shit and walked outta there.

Commissioner Gordon: No one believed. She said, "I wanna make my own record, have the baby and use these unknown guys." They're like, you're Lauryn Hill, why aren't you with Track Masters? It took a lot of courage to go down that road and we all felt like soldiers in her army. Lauryn will push you to the tenth level to get something the way that she's hearing it. The divinity of the scenario was always overwhelming to me because I could feel it all the time.

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.

Pras Michel (founding member, the Fugees): Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill ... Some of our frustrations have been let out to the press and some would argue that you don't wash dirty laundry in public. But we're all grown now and understand the impact we had on each other's lives. The album emotionally grabs you because it was her true feelings of things that happened during that period of her life.

Hill: The album is not about me bein' upset about a love lost. It's not even really about bein' upset about bein' stabbed in the back.