There are probably two main ways songs start. One is having an idea, a musical or lyric phrase, or both, pop into your head. It might be playing on your radio in a dream, it might grab you when you’re catching a bus, singing in the shower, playing an instrument.

The other way is getting inspired by someone else’s song and thinking ‘I want to write something like that’. Sometimes it’s just getting obsessed with some part of it. So we ‘borrow’ the groove, the chord progression or part of it, a melody phrase.

Call it inspiration, call it borrowing, call it a starting point, call it stealing! Who cares? We all do it. As long as it’s not identical to another song there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s an important way we learn the craft and it’s how songwriting grows, evolves, and expands.

If we haven’t carefully written it down or recorded it, by the time we’re working on either our ‘original’ idea or our ‘borrowed’ idea, it’s already changed. Let it. Don’t fight to recapture something that’s already gone.

As with most things related to memory, how we remember will not be precisely accurate. That may be bad for an eyewitness in a courtroom, but for songwriting it’s fine.

Go with whatever’s there, whatever’s left. Your creative mind is already transforming that idea into your idea. It doesn’t matter where it started.

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