re: Question for song writers. How do you put together a song like this?

I hear melody and arrangement and isolate instruments and feel “ the space” of the music. Lyrics hardly register, at least for many listens. So it depends on how your brain processes music.

Bernie Taupin and Elton John was the one that always amazed me, with Taupin writing lyrics first and handing them to Elton who would quickly work out things on the piano. What a weird synergy.

RVZ would listen to the guys work on their ideas.
He go fish and work on lyrics and song ideas.
He’d come back to the band and share his ideas.
Then together the band would noodle it down to a 3 minute song.
If possible.
Sometimes it was more than three minutes.
The key thing to remember is it was RVZ band.
And Ed King was the best guitar player in the band, and the worst bass player. Though it was still pretty good.

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I typically write lyrics first then music but most others I know do the opposite.

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I never could write that way. Music always came first and then lyrics (which were not always easy to come up with).

I have always noticed that my writing style was different depending on what instrument I was playing when the tune came into being. Anything written while playing guitar was usually catchy and easy to follow. The ones written on piano were still kinda catchy, but the ones written when playing around on the KORG and Kurzweil synths kinda lent themselves to sinking back deep into your comfy chair and just zoning out for awhile.

The biggest thing I noticed was that songs that you struggle to write never turn out to be particularly good. It's the songs that seem to just materialize out of thin air that are the best. It's like they were there all along and someone just "gifted" them to you as you were piddling around on your instrument.

I can't speak to Tuesday's Gone but the story behind Sweet Home Alabama was that Van Zant walked in and the guys were fooling around with the guitar licks to the song. Van Zant went down to sit by the river for a while and came back with the lyrics written.

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The biggest thing I noticed was that songs that you struggle to write never turn out to be particularly good. It's the songs that seem to just materialize out of thin air that are the best. It's like they were there all along and someone just "gifted" them to you as you were piddling around on your instrument.

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I agree with this. Even if a verse or two just comes to me, if I can't write the whole song in one sitting I usually am not going to be able to turn it into something worth repeating.

You’re gonna get 37 different answers to this question. If there’s anything musicians can agree on it’s that we can never agree on anything.

Bernie Taupin usually gave Elton lyrics first & then Elton wrote the melodies from there.

Heroin is the short answer.

The long answer involves what some would call some kind of mental disorder so they get loaded up on pharmaceutical grade meth and never blossom into one lick of a good song.

Opioids are better for the artsy folks, but Uncle Sam is pushing the opposite for industrial productivity (income taxes and such...)

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This is 100% wrong

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No it's not. You may not do this, but you are full of shite to say that this isn't the case for most musicians.

A band's members will have all hundreds/thousands of melodies, riffs, fills, bass lines, etc that they have saved from noodling and playing on their own. They will present these concepts to the rest of the band and then they will see what works, iterate, scrap, save for later, etc.

I'm speaking from my own personal experience playing in a band, as well as the recounted experiences of countless others. Look up basically any band or musician and their process and you will see as such. Van Morrison wrote all his music first. Guys like James Hetfield/Kirk Hammett will have thousands of voice notes on their phone where they play little riffs/chord progressions or hum little melodies that they want to explore later. Tool - same thing. They'll bring ideas to the group, spend countless hours refining with one another, then bring in Maynard at the very end who throws down lyrics and vocal melodies at the finish line. shite, here's a note from a vinyl of one of my favorite bands -

"This song was birthed from Ed, Riley, and I sitting in our practice space post-practice. I sort of started playing a riff out of the blue, and they both joined in with their own respective parts. This ended up being the chorus and I don't think it strayed one bit from that spontaneous verison."

Lyrics are usually developed completely independently from the songs they end up being used on. Lyricists will have notebooks worth of material and apply them once they have music that fits. Noel Gallagher of Oasis said that lyrics were basically an afterthought to them.

There's no fixed method for writing music - it's the most iterative process there is. Everyone does it a different way. Bob Dylan did lyrics first, David Bowie alternated, etc. What I described in the above paragraphs is 100% more common than a lyrics-first approach though. Don't come up in here yapping like I'm the one that's full of shite, just go do some reading