What a great thread. At times I have agreed and disagreed with every post and that makes it thought provoking at the very least.

Mousethief does a good job summing things up in a way. I think there is more than one dynamic taking place though. You have the relationship of singer to song, song to audience, and singer to audience to consider and much that I have viewed as navel gazing only has the dynamic of singer to song.......nothing else happening.

When I hear a song, the relationship the song has to me and within my sphere of experience or imagination seems to mean the most. If I can't relate somehow to what is being sung, it falls flat. There are times hoever that in a live performance, I am taken enough with the singer and their relationship to song and audience, that I enjoy the performance. Later, I buy the CD and listen again and wonder why the hell I ever thought they were worth a shit. I think now of Lisa Loeb who I saw a few years ago on tour with The Lilith Fair thing. She really got me onstage, kinda' funny and one helluva' picker, and very fine relationship to the audience. I was gassed!!! So I but her CD, same songs and all, and SPLAT......hit the bottom like wet towel. Completely impossible for me to relate to, pretty childish and indeed churlish/girlish lyrics..............What happened? I was locked into a performance, not the songs.

It's important to understand too that we need not have the experience as a listener to appreciate the song, but let our power of imagination take us to places we haven't been. You can think of songs you love and even sing yourself, songs you deliver well, written by someone else and outside your natural experience, and yet they are quite real thanks to your imagination and sometimes other emotions as well, such as compassion.

If you think of Folk Music as a broad and flowing river fed by many tributaries, the "navel gazing/introspective" type songs are one of those tributaries. Years pass and the songs fill the little creek and eventually reach the river.........Well, some of them do. Others are left in backwaters and swamps and evaporate along the way.

Spaw