I think the songs that seem most simple can be most difficult to master. I wonder if this is as true for instrumentalists as it is for singers??? I am primarily a singer and even in my classical, art song days the simplest-spunding ones were the toughest to make sound effortless...like "O mio babbino caro" that aria that is on all the commericals these days...that octave jump is rough!

as is the jump in "Danny Boy" that bane of all Celtic singers...this is sung so badly so often that to do it well takes extraordinary effort so your performance can wipe away everyone's bad experience of it...I find octave (or greater) jumps difficult because of the confidence factor; this is a different issue for women someimtes since it can involve a shift from chest to head voice and my own way of keeping pitch and tone level in those two ranges is fairly different (since one resonates more in the head and the other in the throat, to some degree)...and no, I am not one of those people who think the head voice/chest voice thing is hogwash! I have long and intimate experience of it...and poor understanding of it leads to vocal chord abuse and, in women, can lead to vocal nodes...this is also one of the reasons women's voices tire and "blow out" more easily than men's, also that people enjoy hearing men sing in a high range )tenor) and enjoy women's voices in the lower registers (alto) and this is where that head/chest split can cause problems...

Songs which have a lot of movement in that area (near the split)are hard for me to master vocally, too, because of working with the best way to "place" the song: keep it all in head voice to avoid any awkward shift? (the smooth transition within a phrase takes lots of practice and I will usually try to sing a song twenty or more times before performing it in public) Finding the proper key for one's voice can be crucial to get the best sound...but at the same time I am not one to move a classic like "Lakes of Pontchartrain" to anything weirder than C or D...

that said, one of the most difficult traditional songs I have ever worked on is "Turlagh og O'Boyle" because of its vast range, tempo and density of lyrics. It is exhausting...but worth the work. I have a demo recoridng of it i did and wish the vocal exhaustion by song's end were not so apparent (of course no one but me notices it but!) and that i could find a way to get through it with breath left over...is that a sign of a good performance? I guess it means you give your all...and why some songs are left specially for the end of the set!

Peg