Re Jim's question about the supernatural: I've been thinking a lot recently about how to handle songs containing ideas which I'm not wholly comfortable with, and I've found a three-part solution which seems to work for me most of the time.

Firstly, I quite often encounter a 'sticking point' in an otherwise perfectly good ballad, and have in the past been guilty of skating over one verse or episode so that I could get on to the next bit. The more I looked at these points though, the more I realised that maybe it was the strength of emotion in those particular lines that I'd been uncomfortable with. There's at least one great thread on here about how to cope with songs that make you cry, so suffice it to say that many of these are now, I think, the most powerful moments in my performance of those songs.

Second, as someone said above, empathy with the characters and with the makers of the song. This is where I find a bit of 'back story' helps. As an example, I learned the song 'The Rigs of Rye' last year but have been reluctant to perform it because I couldn't muster any sympathy for the male character. The last time I did peform it, someone came up to me afterwards and supplied me with an extra verse I'd never heard before, including the line 'this lad, barely 19 years old' - which somehow transformed the whole thing for me, and now it works.

Lastly, and most importantly for me, is to find the 'human truth' in whatever you're singing. My day job is all about finding true meaning in symbols and fantasy, and I find that applies here too. So when I sing 'The Unquiet Grave', it doesn't matter that I don't believe in ghosts, what matters is that I have some understanding of love and loss and pain and despair and...