I'm not a musician but I sing a bit and like to write songs. Sometimes I find easy to develop a melody from a scrap of lyric and sometimes melodies just float into my head and I sing them into a tape recorder before I forget them. If I get really stuck, I pick up a book of lyrics, choose a song I don't know and use the words to help me come up with a decent tune and then write my own lyrics to that tune.

What I worry about though is that I have no idea where the songs I write really come from. It's all about the lightbulb flashing above my head and who's to say when that will stop happening?

Melody is a difficult thing to define, I think. Many folk song melodies are simple to the point of being inane yet somehow within the context, work. Steve Rich's music is stunning but is is melodic? Well, maybe. Leo Sayer's songs have strong and memorable melodies that you can hum after one hearing. Do we hail him as a genius? We don't but maybe we should.