Bernie Taupin is to lyricists what the Beatles were to musicians and songwriters—he lived the Dream. He really wasn't that musical, not at first, not when he penned most of their best songs in the 60s and 70s. He just wrote "poems" that could be songs, maybe. This is from his recent interview in Time:



...the pair did not meet organically: In 1967, they both answered the same advertisement from Liberty Records seeking songwriters. John couldn’t write lyrics; Taupin couldn’t write melodies. But when John was handed an envelope of Taupin’s poems, he was moved by their lyricism and began cutting demos to them. The pair soon met and developed a close relationship that Taupin called a “non-sexual love affair.”

“When we started it out it was really just me and him,” Taupin said. They slept in bunk-beds in John’s mother’s flat and were often broke; Taupin would write lyrics in a back bedroom while John fit his words to melodies in front of an upright piano. “It was very much a sort of stream-of-consciousness,” Taupin said of his own lyrical style. “I would write whatever I felt, and he would jerry-rig it into a song.”

Many soon-to-be classics were written in that space. A scene from Rocketman shows Taupin handing John (played by Taron Egerton) some lyrics and then going upstairs to brush his teeth. By the time he has rinsed and returned, John has formed the indelible melody of “Your Song,” which would be the pair’s first breakout hit in the United States. “It’s pretty much how it happened,” Taupin said of the scene. “I did write the lyric to ‘Your Song’ over the breakfast table—and I remember there was a coffee mug stain on the lyric.” Taupin does point out a couple small discrepancies, including the fact that John’s mother and grandmother weren’t actually there, as well as the size of the apartment: “There wasn’t an upstairs. It was a one-level apartment, and very small, too.”

http://www.soundclick.com/MarkKaufman