I like what harvey andrews said ("I find it's the audience singing that slows a chorus song down.") and also what Leadfingers said ("My own case , IF I am nervous I have a tendency to do things too fast"). I will launch into, say, Barrett's Privateers at what I think is about the speed Stan Rogers did it on Between the Breaks, and the audience will come in on the chorus and slow it wayyyy down, and I get a bit flustered. Maybe in my nervousness I was tearing through it and the audience was just returning it to where it was supposed to be. Maybe I was doing it at Stan Rogers' pace but the audience, which hasn't practiced it as much as I have, doesn't know it well enough to do it that fast. Maybe the audience just likes it slower than I like it.

Was there much discussion here about Sinead O'Connor's folk CD of a couple years back? I loved the choice of material, found some of the musical accompaniment very tasteful and some very distracting, but most of all was struck by how slow some of the renditions were. "Peggy Gordon" shouldn't stretch to five-and-a-half minutes (in my opinion).