I've always thought of my "career(?)" as a musical antique shop. Finding the antiques and displaying them any way I could--setting them up with humorous tales, or even serious tales, was my method of choice--but the ballads--story songs from history--were always pushed to the fore in a way that, hopefully, was subtle and not noticable.
That said, for me, writing my own songs always seemed like putting a plastic table in that shops window! It was truly out of place there.

Still I did it on 3 occasions that sort of succeeded. But I surrounded the "plastic tables" with enough "real artifacts" that those were rarely noticed---and I was glad of that.

Art