For me, everything is focused on connecting with my audience. I have to invest myself completely in a song when I perform it, so I write in the first person almost exclusively. I only use the third person when I am positioning myself as a bystander and am narrating a straight story from history, such as this one:

The Price of Freedom
(Joanne Crabtree & Paul Mills)

Like a child whose needs are greatest when the hunger comes again
Who turns toward his mother and cries aloud in pain
It's the soul of a nation bears this heavy load
What's the price of freedom when freedom's child is sold

What's the price of freedom in this land of liberty?
What's the cost of living with the struggle to be free?
Gaining ground by inches, forever standing guard
What's the price of freedom when victory comes so hard?

Michael, James, and Andrew signed on in '64
To register black voters in the savage southern war
Klansmen beat James Chaney bloody on a Mississippi night
Shot and killed the three of them by freedom's flickering light.

What's the price of freedom in this land of liberty?
What's the cost of living with the struggle to be free?
Gaining ground by inches, forever standing guard
What's the price of freedom when victory comes so hard?

James Chaney, local black kid; Michael Schwerner, New York Jew,
Andrew Goodman, liberal college boy, from among the privileged few
They shared one single aspiration, to give every child a choice
They died outside the promised land,
But they strengthened freedom's voice

What's the price of freedom in this land of liberty?
What's the cost of living with the struggle to be free?
Gaining ground by inches, forever standing guard
What's the price of freedom when victory comes so hard?