GW: A lot of good advice above. I like Barbara Shaws and Mikal's especially. Sit in on as many jams as you can find. When I was more deeply into the music business than I now am, we always preferred the jams in the campsites or the motel rooms, because we could improvise and appreciate the improvisations of others on musical numbers. When we were on stage, the fans pretty much wanted any given song we performed to sound exactly as it did on whatever album we had played it on --even if the album had been done several years earlier, and I found myself playing back to whatever I had been doing in the studio (not terribly exciting). Take the songs you like and, as Mikal says, make them yours; that advice needs no elaboration or elaboration. There are songs which I have performed onstage for years, but which still bring me almost to tears or make me laugh aloud, and that's exciting!