Dottie’s Charms – in New York Times!

Given the not-so-vibrant state of the music industry, she said, “There’s a certain freedom right now in being so cynical. You might as well just have fun.”

Ms. Sobule, whose previous releases include crowd-funded albums like “California Years,” a set of songs about her move to the West Coast, and “A Day at the Pass,” a collaboration with the rock singer John Doe, had been strategizing for several years on a project with Mr. Hajdu, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism whose books include “The Ten-Cent Plague” and “Positively Fourth Street.”

The plan, Mr. Hajdu said, had always been to tap into the creativity of authors who might never have had the chance to write a song before.

“A lot of people, not just writers, have a good song in them,” Mr. Hajdu said. “But maybe just one.”

Finding a central theme for this record proved elusive at first: Ms. Sobule and Mr. Hajdu at one point considered buying a random high school yearbook on eBay and asking their contributors to take their lyrical inspiration from it.

But the album snapped sharply into focus when Ms. Sobule mentioned the charm bracelet that she had worn only a couple of times.

“Not to be melodramatic about it, but we actually stopped cold in the street,” Mr. Hajdu said. “It really seemed perfect, because we didn’t know anything about the owner. But then, here’s all this material evidence of something.”

Ms. Sobule posted photographs and descriptions of the bracelet on her website to see if she could find its original owner (and to make sure it had not been sold off by someone’s thoughtless grandchildren).

She and Mr. Hajdu also began reaching out to potential lyricists, some of whom turned them down. (“I got a really sweet letter from Judy Blume,” Ms. Sobule said. “That almost made the whole thing worth it.”)

Among the writers who did participate in “Dottie’s Charms” was the novelist and short-story writer Sam Lipsyte (“Home Land,” “The Fun Parts”), who contributed a comedic country song called “I Hate Horses.”

Looking at a charm shaped like a stirrup, Mr. Lipsyte said, “I started thinking about horses, and I started to remember when I was in elementary school, and all the girls would draw horses in their notebooks. I imagined that Dottie was not part of that crowd.”

Mr. Lipsyte said he found this challenge different from writing fiction and not particularly helped by his years singing in a punk-rock band called Dungbeetle.

“That was at a moment in my life when I wanted the language to disappear,” he said. “I didn’t want my lyrics, necessarily, to be heard. This was different; I knew these lyrics needed to be interesting, and they would be audible.”

Mary Jo Salter, the poet and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, said she was motivated to write a spirited breakup song by a charm in the shape of a wedding ring, as well as circumstances in her own life.

“I was going through a divorce, and it seemed so obvious to me,” said Ms. Salter, whose song is also called “Wedding Ring.” “I saw the ring and I just thought, well, obviously, that’s what I’m doing.”

“It gave me something I wanted to say anyway,” Ms. Salter said. With a knowing laugh, she added: “I wasn’t having very much fun. It was a way to be jaunty.”

When she heard Ms. Sobule’s recording of her lyrics, Ms. Salter said: “I was very pleased that it was as Jill described it, very Elton Johnesque and exactly the tone I would have hoped to hear. It made much more of a statement than I even realized I was making.”

Mr. Hajdu, who dabbles in pop songwriting and live performance, wrote two songs for the album: “Women of Industry,” a union fight song inspired by a charm with the American Business Women’s Association logo; and “I Swear I Saw Christopher Reeve,” taken from a charm celebrating Mackinac Island in Michigan.

While composing that song, Mr. Hajdu said he and Ms. Sobule played guitar together over Skype. “And we wrote the whole thing,” he said, “and then she demoed it out. She brought in musicians and had a releasable recording.”

“And then,” Mr. Hajdu said, “she threw out my music and started all over.”

Asked how he felt at the time, Mr. Hajdu answered: “Not good. But she was right.”

Though none of the songwriters on “Dottie’s Charms” worked with another, Mr. Hajdu said the authors came to similar conclusions about the mystery woman at the heart of the album.

“Everybody imagined the same person, essentially,” he said. “The lonely, hard-working gal. Smart, works in an office, travels around the country but all domestic travel — there’s no Eiffel Tower, no Big Ben.”

“It seems like maybe she’s filling time or looking for something,” Mr. Hajdu said. “But we didn’t know what.”

If “Dottie’s Charms” has not solved Ms. Sobule’s continuing search for source material, it has made her more attentive on her visits to vintage stores, like the one in Los Angeles where a $250 doll styled like the Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury, recently caught her eye.

“I’ll go on Facebook or Instagram to ask advice from people — ‘Should I buy this?’ ” she said. “Everyone was like: ‘Are you kidding? You’ve got to get it.’ I don’t know if I want to. But it was pretty amazing.”

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