Piano Lessons turned to singing

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd started taking piano lessons with Bob Murphy. Well I hurt my hand a bit (no big story..just bad luck)and substituted a singing lesson with Bob for a piano lesson. Also in my last post, I posed the question of how you know if you have talent and if you should dedicate yourself to your craft and sacrifice more stable and conservative pursuits. So Bob prefaced his comments on my singing with the statement that he was known as being very opinionated and that he was not one to mince words. I had prepared myself for the worst when he said something to the effect that I had the potential to be a great jazz singer. THis man has played with Sarah Vaughn so I take his opinion in very high regard. What does this mean? I'm not great now, but with work (and potetially a lot of it) I could be. Hmmm. We started the second voice lesson with the brutal process of recording and analyzing my singing of a tune, assessing it's strengths and weaknesses, and trying again.....brutal and unforgiving. In this process I found and interesting parallel to my wife's progress as a competitive cyclist: as she works on one area of weakness another area of strength suffers. (see her blog http://www.leedarling.blogspot.com/ )
As we worked on my rhythmic weaknesses, the vocal technique and the melodic interest suffered horribly. It truly opens up your mind to how complex music can be. Just when you think you've got a pretty good handle on it someone teaches you something that shows you how little you actually know. wow. I'll try to post some mp3 files of the recordings we do at our lessons to document the progress.