(continued from Part I)

Our longest day was Saturday. We talked about the Big Idea and saying 1 thing and 1 thing only in our songs. We experienced two more opportunities of songwriting in groups of 3 or 4 to focus and write within a select amount of time around a theme. Probably the most grueling (and possibly because it was our third time that weekend) was the afternoon/evening session with special guest and gifted songwriter Sam Mizell. Sam critiqued our first round of our songwriting and then sent us off to make our changes. An hour later we had to come back and present our re-writes.

Sam was generous to come around and give us feedback even in our working groups, which gave us a lot of real-time feedback to work with. Not all of

his comments were easy to hear, but we were also stretched beyond the status quo as he challenged us to go beyond and consider the obscure. He pointed out hooks and themes that took our songs to different levels than we thought before. Sam has written for numerous artists, has a Grammy nomination and many Dove awards. We figured he knew what he was talking about! 🙂 Cindy wanted us to understand the importance of our words and that every one of them should be chosen strategically. We only have 3-4 minutes to convey our thoughts in a song so we need to make our words few as more words have less meaning. (continued in Part III)