After a painful childhood and marriage, the US singer-songwriter used writing to understand her schizophenia. A new film explores the wondrous music she then made

Julia Greenberg was in a friend’s car, driving through New England, when a playful ballad about a Hollywood down-and-out came on the stereo. Who is this, she wondered. “She sounded so wholly unique,” Greenberg says, 15 years later, on a video call from her home in New York. Googling the song’s title, Holy Man on Malibu Bus Number Three, she discovered the mellifluous singer was Dory Previn: a Hollywood lyricist turned troubadour whose witty, incisive and deeply personal music ploughed its own furrow in the 1970s, amassing a cult following in spite of modest sales.

“She should be known, you know?” Greenberg says with a passion that she has funnelled into her documentary film, titled Dory Previn: On My Way to Where, which chronicles the artist’s extraordinary life in music. As a fan of Previn’s singer-songwriter contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Carole King, I lament to Greenberg’s co-director, Dianna Dilworth, that I’m not as familiar with Previn as I should be. “That was me as well,” Dilworth smiles on a call from Switzerland. “We hear that from everyone.”