Years, ago, I saw an interview by Elton explaining his songwriting process. His music partner, Bernie Taupin, writes all the lyrics. But, what Bernie does is just hand Elton a long page of basically poetry. Sometimes it's even disjointed imagery. Bernie doesn't write anything in music format, "This is the verse. . . This is the Refrain/Chorus. . ." It's just that page of long sentences.
Elton takes the page and noodles around with it. Sometimes, he doesn't even start the song with the first sentence Bernie wrote down. He mixes things around, decides what is the refrain, which lines get repeated, etc., and figures out a song & melody from all that. Bernie has never had an ego where he's said, "Wait, the first sentence I wrote should be the first sentence in the song. . ." The two of them, working together the way they do, make incredible music.