Hey, Vixen:

One more word of encouragement. Frankie, in my quartet, has a real hard time knowing when to come in when he is leading a song. One of the songs he sings lead on is He Looked Beyond My Faults And Saw My Needs. (appropo for this thread..) We tried everything to help him, including nods, guitar introductions, hand signals... the more we tried, the more confused he got. We finally decided that it was more important for him to put feeling into the song, because he does such a beautiful job on it. Now, we just Frankie sing, and I just wait for him to go into the next line while I accompany him on guitar. When he starts the chorus, we all come in on time with him, and we wait for each line, because sometimes he'll take a couple of extra beats before he goes into the next one. We concentrate on the message of the song, and Frankie sings it with such Spirit and feeling that it is one of the best songs we do. There are times when he is so emotionally immersed in the song that we gut pulled in and one of ud will just have to step away, completely overcome by the power of the message. The audience responds in the same way. Once we stopped getting all wound up about erratic timing and let the song and the singer sing from the bottom of his heart, we realized that that was all that really mattered.

Sometimes, it's just enough to sing with your heart.

Jerry