I'm exactly in agreement with Little Hawk as to how to write a song. Thing is, I'm not an original thinker--doubt I would be writing trad-style songs if I were one. And what usually inspires me to write a song is ...another song (or live performance). The challenge is to accept this as a starting point, then make it your own song. Sometimes there are multiple influences.

For example my song "The Anna Grace"--that of course is a blue clicky to the mp3 page of same--although it was inspired by the works of Stan Rogers and this is easy to spot, the melody is really a variant of "Loch Lomond", which nobody ever seems to notice without me telling them.

To come up with the instrumental bridge in that song, though, I said to myself "What would Gordon Bok do here?" Probably something more sophisticated than I did, but I'm happy with it.

W-O