I'll get the melody and the form of the song, and then I'll start to hear the sound of the words. But basically, I'll hear the way the vowels lay into the melody. I'll just be singing nonsense syllables, la la la. Eventually I'll write the lyrics, and I'll go back to these early fumbling around tapes when I was just trying to grab some words or get the sound of a word that connects, and the vowels on those tapes often line up perfectly with the lyrics I wrote three months later. When she's working with a co-writer, many times that person will have a song idea about a specific subject.
Most people get an idea and then they try to write the idea.
So it's almost subconscious, the way that my songs come up, especially the ones I write by myself. I Can Do About it Now. He was cutting, and I had to get a song to him by a certain time. I had the title, I knew this was the title, and I had no idea how to write it. It was like writing backwards.