“This is a labor of love for me,” says Lauren Christy. The hit songwriter, whose credits include Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” Bebe Rexha’s “Me, Myself and I” and Enrique Iglesias’ “Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You),” is talking about the just-released collection Their Hits, My Way featuring her own interpretations of her greatest hits, but she could just as easily be referring the profession of songwriting itself.

When Christy was coming up, first as an artist and later as part of production trio The Matrix, the economics of the craft were starkly different from those of today. In the ’90s and early 2000s, you could make a comfortable living from writing songs on a commercial release. Even if said song wasn’t a single, the proportional pay from an album cut — with LPs or CDs costing upwards of $10 each — was not insignificant. “You could literally buy a house,” says Christy.

Today? It’s an entirely different story.

“It’s very, very difficult to just be a songwriter today,” says Christy, who teaches a master class on the songwriting and offers advice for aspiring writers on TikTok. “With streaming, somehow the formula got flipped and the songwriter is the least important person. You got left out of the pie. And it’s so sad because, consider: you don’t need a recording studio; you don’t need recording engineers; you don’t need mastering engineers; or a record label or anything if you don’t have a song. It all starts with a song. We’re gonna need to have a national funeral for songwriters if something doesn’t change.”

For her part, Christy adapted to an evolving business by learning music production. Unlike writers, producers’ fees and royalty points are agreed upon prior to a song’s release. Songwriters often work on spec and may be the last to know if their contribution was used, by which time the negotiation window — which doesn’t currently exist — is closed.

Christy took a year to record her versions of classics like “Tonight I’m Loving You” (Enrique Iglesias)” and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” (Dua Lipa), recruiting her daughters to sing background vocals and her friend Benj Heard to produce. Ultimately, “it was so fun to make,” says Christy of the experience. It also allowed her to give some shine to songs that didn’t fly up the Billboard charts, like Ferras’ “Hollywood’s Not America,” released in 2008, which was a contender for that year’s American Idol theme song. “I always say the album we made, Aliens and Rainbows, was one of the best records I’ve ever been involved. It should’ve been this huge smash, but the universe had other plans for him.”

“I just wanted to sing the songs that I’d been part of,” Christy says of the project. “Seeing as I started out as an artist, then went behind the curtain and I’ve collaborated on all these songs that have been successful, I got to a point in my career where I thought, I’d like to sing them. I’m certainly not trying to be a pop star at this age. But if you’re a creative person, you should always be creative.”

Christy points to a “spiritual undertone” to her lyricism as the through-line to her work. “It’s about making people feel something,” she says. “I like to do deep dark stuff, but I can also write fun little pop ditties, too.” Her process is adaptive to the environment she finds herself in, be it working with Korn or Britney Spears. “I’m channelling something. I can just be in the room and have absolutely nothing — I even show up a lot of times with no ideas — and I trust that something’s going to come through. And I can feel it when the music starts.”

Asked if there’s a genre she hasn’t yet conquered, Christy points to one. “I haven’t had any success in country,” she says. “But I love it. I just worked with Jesse Murph who is amazing. We wrote some beautiful, deep songs.”

To that end, Christy sees mentorship for the next generation of writers and performers as a responsibility. “My thing is, please don’t just be a songwriter. There’s not really a career for you right now. It’s kind of volunteer work,” she says. “Songwriters have to adapt and get good at production. If you want to survive as a songwriter now, you have to produce yourself and produce other people. And these young people, I see they have just as much passion about it. So thank God for people standing up to protect them.”