It was just mind-bogglingly better! I remember having a fleeting thought that this was borderline witchcraft or something. I couldnвЂ™t quite get my head around one of the changes he suggested on another number, so he whipped out his guitar and played & sang this song he had just heard for the first time, but with his revised chorus. But it kept happening that I truly liked all his ideas for improvements. But that had to be a one-off, I thought.ДЄs I began to realize that he was going to have suggestions for every single song, I started preparing myself to offer at least some token resistance, and to defend the status quo of my little works. I would never have seen it, but it was perfect and kind of brilliant. (Probably unsaleable, too, come to think of it.) He actually had me turn a portion of a verse into a bridge and, when I tried it on for size, I was amazed at how it had improved the song. He did it on the first song I played for him, which was one that I thought was pretty unassailable.

Marc-Alan asked me thoughtful questions after each song and almost always had a suggestion for a tweak or two. On day one, I think we maybe got through a dozen songs in the morning and another five early that evening after we had hit the infamous Florabama Lounge for some afternoon open mic performances. We set up a couple of days with a plan to meet and review some of my stuff, to hit a few shows and meet some folks backstage, maybe do an open mic, take a stab at writing a song together and generally get me some exposure to what the Nashville songwriting scene is all about. MAB said that just about everybody in the Nashville songwriting community would be there for this event anyway, so it would be nearly as good as being in Nashville. My tour with Marc-Alan was not in Nashville, but was at the Frank Brown SongwriterвЂ™s Festival which took place at various venues along the gulf coast in south Alabama and northern Florida, which was logistically easier for me to get to than Nashville. I am here to tell you-he did that and a helluva lot more. So, my outreach to MAB was mostly with the hope he might could help me supercharge my effort to do things like this. And itвЂ™s especially cool when, during that search for the right words, the whole story or message of the song takes an unexpected turn and becomes something way more interesting than what I thought I was writing about to begin with.

I love dialing in an unexpected but uncontrived sounding metaphor, and I get fired up when I occasionally nail the words to вЂњshow, not tellвЂќ something, and doing all that without being too precious or artsy-fartsy. Something nice seems to go off in my brain from finding words with sing-able consonants and vowels and that actually advance the idea of the song or maybe resolve the setup with a catchy hook. I guess I get a weird mental charge out of the process of coming up with a word or phrase that has just the right syllables for the available space in the piece, or from stumbling upon a graceful rhyme thatвЂ™s not too cheesy just when I thought I might be stuck and have to reload on the preceding lines. I do, however, want to get better at it for some reason that IвЂ™m still trying to work out. IвЂ™m an older guy who has dabbled with songwriting for years, but with no aspirations to do anything professionally. There are plenty of informative, entertaining and even eloquent testimonials and participant reviews on Marc-AlanвЂ™s website, so itвЂ™s with no small risk of possibly being redundant (and what songwriter isnвЂ™t willing to take that risk?), that I offer my recounting of a great experience.

Just finished my first вЂњtourвЂќ with Marc-Alan, Barnette.

Masterwriter assign song to group