“I just proceeded to write song after song after song.”

That’s how musician Ingrid Michaelson describes the time, seven years ago, after she learned Broadway producers were trying to get a musical adaptation of The Notebook—the film she had seen dozens of times over—off the ground.

Michaelson, the indie artist whose songs like “The Way I Am” have appeared in everything from an Old Navy ad to Grey’s Anatomy, always wanted to write a musical, but had kept that dream private, just between her and her partner, the actor Will Chase. That all changed when Chase let a friend know of Michaelson’s Broadway ambitions at a party. Turns out, that friend was Broadway producer Kevin McCollum, who asked for a meeting with Michaelson. He was working on landing the rights to The Notebook, the IP gold that was Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel—famously adapted into the 2004 Nick Cassavetes film, which made stars out of little-known actors Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams and launched newfound appreciation for rainy days. Michaelson went home to her Brooklyn apartment after that meeting, holed herself away, and started writing music to the cult-levels-of-obsession love story she knew all too well. She kept writing songs and sending them to McCollum, who would then share them with Kurt Deutsch, the other producer of the musical. “I think after the fifth song, they were like, ‘Well, I think we should hire this woman.’”

Indeed, Michaelson was hired alongside playwright Bekah Brunstetter and directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams, and today, The Notebook is a bona fide Broadway hit, with a score so strikingly beautiful it makes audience members cry and cry and cry. “We want people to feel cracked open and to feel love,” says Michaelson. And she certainly experienced that offstage. “This experience has been very healing for me in the wake of losing both my parents, realizing that I’m not going to have a child, and making these huge decisions,” she says. “But I always had The Notebook. I had this thing that was buoying me through these times.”

Here, Michaelson speaks with VF about her creative process.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: How many times would you guess you’ve seen or read The Notebook?

Ingrid Michaelson: I read the book once, and I might’ve watched the movie once [since signing up for this project], but I didn’t want to be overinfluenced. I had seen the movie many times, so I know it pretty well. When it’s on TV, you can turn it on halfway through. It’s like Titanic for me.

I’ve always been a fan of not taking the movie and putting it on stage, but creating another iteration of the property. There’s the book, there’s the movie, and then we wanted there to be the piece of theater. From the very beginning, I knew I didn’t want to just slap the movie on stage, because to me, that’s not satisfying.

So I made sure not to overly comb through it, because at the base, The Notebook is about two people that are in love, who are held apart because of class, family and expectations, and are reunited. We always thought that as long as we’re hitting all of the key points, we can play, expand, and have fun with this structure.

How does songwriting for a musical differ from writing your own music?

It almost felt like a delicious homework assignment, because you’re not searching for what you want to write the song about. A lot of times when I’m writing music, the melody will dictate the language, but with The Notebook, it was language-first, because I knew what information I had to put into the songs. But there was definitely still some scrambling around, because with the assignment you’re still thinking, ‘How do I make this as great as it can be?’ I think I had four versions of one of the big numbers before I ended up with the song “My Days.” Nobody asked me to rewrite it, I just was like, ‘This isn’t enough.’ I kept going back to the piano and writing another song and another song, and I finally got “My Days,” and thought, “OK, this is the one.”

What was your process like? Did you write the music once the book was completed, or was it a more fluid process?

I had a whole bunch of songs when Bekah came on board, but we ended up letting half of them go, because they just didn’t make sense anymore. I kind of liken it to a zipper, where each prong has to lay on top of the next one for the zipper to be fully zipped. That’s the way we worked. It was like one hand on top of the other, with the directors, choreographers and producers, until we zipped this piece up together.

Bekah and I worked very much in a deep, deep collaboration, handing the baton back and forth.

We were in constant communication asking each other if certain scenes or lyrics made sense. It was very much like, ‘Sure, get rid of the song if we need a scene,’ or, ‘Get rid of the scene if we need a song.’

Of all those songs that you sent to the producers seven years ago, did any make it into the final production?

The very first song I wrote is the penultimate song in the whole piece, when older Allie recognizes Noah.

Were there other musicals you looked to for inspiration?

I didn’t listen to a lot of musical theater while I was working, because I didn’t want to be influenced. I wanted to be pure and write what I wanted to write. But I went to a lot of theater and was inspired by the artistry. Hadestown really hit me hard. And I just loved everything about Waitress. Sara [Bareilles, who wrote the music to Waitress] is one of my good friends and has been a really lovely cheerleader and support. I would reach out whenever I felt like I was in need of some sort of wisdom. Another person who helped me through is Shaina Taub, the composer of Suffs. I didn’t want to bother people, but I wanted little nuggets of encouragement, then to figure it out on my own.

At various points throughout the show, everyone around me was sobbing in this collective, cathartic cry. What does it feel like to have the superpower to seemingly make people cry on command?

Well, I don’t think it’s just me. It’s our amazing actors, directors, book writer, lighting designer—everyone. It’s of a whole. But I love the power that music has. You can hear a piece of music that doesn’t even have lyrics, and it can bring tears to your eyes. I think it’s so magical that things that don’t even have words can conjure emotions. Our goal was always to make people feel. We didn’t know people would be crying as much as they were. I mean, we were all crying in rehearsals, but we thought it was because we were so tied to the show!

The actual amount of crying has been a little shocking. Some people are really crying. But we don’t leave you in shambles. There’s a coda at the end that is meant to say, we are all human. We are all going through the same things; we’re all in this theater together. It’s just such a human experience. And to be vulnerable enough to allow yourself to openly cry in a room of a thousand strangers, that gives permission to the next person to cry. There’s something about this collective release that I think people need so badly.

While this is your debut behind the scenes on a Broadway show, you’ve actually been on Broadway before, starring in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 back in 2017. Did your experience on The Notebook inspire you to get back on stage?

Being on stage is so hard. I only did Comet for five weeks, which felt like a good amount of time for me, as somebody who had never done it before. But to find that truth night after night, it seems near impossible. I like the idea of doing something, but I think if I did, it would have to be a limited run. I love performing, and I went to school for musical theater, but I don’t think I have what it takes to be in a show for a year and to keep making those discoveries. It’s not a “no,” it’s an “I don’t know.” But it might be fun to perform again in some capacity. I'm always going to be doing my own shows and concerts. I'm actually putting out a record in the summer that I'm really excited about.

What has it been like working on the cast recordings?

It sounds so good. You can’t hear all the orchestration in the theater, so you really get to dial things in when you’re mixing in a studio. There are the oboe, harp, and all of these string instruments that you didn’t quite catch in the theater. It’s so magical to be able to take all of these pieces of the orchestration and make sure they fit perfectly sonically so you can hear every bit. I come from the recording world, so this has been so fun and gratifying. The songs are coming so alive to me. It’s been medicinal.

The Notebook cast album comes out on April 19th, which also happens to be the release date of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poet’s Department album.

I know. I was like, ‘Are we fools that we’re releasing on the same day?’ I think her fans would probably be fans of this, as well. But I feel like nobody else will be releasing that day, because everyone’s probably terrified to release on the same day as Taylor Swift. But there we are.