Hi, Andrew. You go about songwriting as I do...melody comes first. If it's a hit, it comes easily. But I struggle with words. Well, I'm not a lyricist, I write words. Anyway, I have to wait for the melody to let me know what the title is. Sometimes I know right away, sometimes takes months. My words are conversational. I've had some songs take me up to 20 years to write! In some of those cases, I found someone to write the lyrics or to finish the song. But most important, the words have to feel like the melody. It has to have the mood because the melody fills in the spaces between the letters of the words. I consider my most beautiful song to be "Raindrop Soul" and my best story to be "Far From Home." I think people don't consciously realize how important the melody is and that's what they associate a story with. Lots of times my songs start out so personal that people may not "get" it and I rewrite and rewrite to make them more universal. "Equal!" was like that...took me a year to write because it's my theme song from my life with autism but it's always taken as a feminist theme. It could be, actually. "Just Another Weekend" went through a few rewrites. I thought of all the things I did on weekends and it was, of course, conversational. I usually have a formula for most things I do like writing melodies or painting pictures...but lyrics? My situation is like yours and what I really try to do is to try to find out what the melody feels like, what emotions does it bring up?