Bert, of course you're right - I was merely trying to make the point that it doesn't always follow because you've written a song that it could or should be sung to anyone else. Sometimes writing a song is just that, but choosing to perform your own material is something that takes a lot more skill and judgement. There are an awful lot of mediocre songs out there and I've listened to some fairly boring ones - I owe it to my craft and skill not to add to that list myself. Working out which songs I want to present to others is a large part of my job as a songwriter and sometimes far more difficult than the task of writing the songs in the first place. There are no rules about what you can/should/ought to write about, and maybe some of the songs I discard might be considered good by some people, but (speaking here as someone who is booked as a songwriter and therefore my repertoire is 100% my own material) songs have still got to earn their way into my gig list. Maybe because they have a chorus - maybe because they change the mood - maybe because there's a local or contemporary reference. But I've come across a lot of singers who seem not to discriminate between the relative values of their own songs (no one on this list that I know of, to be sure!) and I wanted to make the distinction between writing and performing songs.

Anyone can write a song about anything. Not all songs are worth performing!

Anne