With the encouragement of a lot of you mudcatters, I've been singing with a trad Irish band for about a year now. It's been a blast and it's been fascinating watching the group evolve in a kind of unpredictable way. One thing I'm still having trouble with is getting everyone to realize that songs are not just tunes with words. When the band does a set of reels, we just run through them full steam, repeat after repeat, A to B and on to the next tune. Doing songs that way doesn't work. I think we need to take a break between verses, to let the words sink in and let me ctach my breath. Since none of the music I have is written with breaks (except some arranged by the Clancy Brothers), we've had to improvise. We've had the guitar player strum a couple of bars before each new verse, we've had the whistle player repeat the last two measures of the chorus before each new verse. I'm curious what others do.