Kris..no. All I ask is you respect the words. How you perform them, what nuance you put on them etc is up to you.You can still make anyone else's song your own by the way you interpret it for an audience..in the same way that some actors are great Lears and others are disasters. I recently heard a young female singer of growing reputation sing "Black leg Miners" Now this is one of the most ferocious and hate filled songs I know and yet she sings it with no emotion whatsoever, she might just as well have been singing the phone book. To address Rick's point re "Death come easy". That was the song that convinced me I could do it.it was first recorded by me on an E.P. (remember those?) with martin Carthy as my guitarist back up. Then it was recorded by a Danish trio who toured with Paul Simon in Europe and I have a letter from Paul saying "the damned thing is driving me crazy. Fine song man." Now, if he'd have recorded it how could my life have changed? Then the Ian Campbell group did it on an album and it entered my past...until one morning as the Fleet sailed towards the Falklands I was in Exeter having breakfast with a friend and listening to the national radio news when a song extract was played..I thought "I know that song". It was being transmitted by Argentina's Tokyo Rose and broadcast as anti_British propoganda for the troops in the ships to hear, they played another extract and then I thought "Bloody Hell! I wrote that!!" It was "Death come Easy" By the time I motored home the tabloid press had traced the writer and my agent had a phone call from "The Sun" newspaper asking if she represented this "traitor" who'd written a song against "our boys". Well, you can imagine with all the patriotic crap clogging up the brains of the nation at such a time I was in a pretty pickle.A reporter and photographer turned up at my house and thankfully accepted my explanation that the song was an old one, I had no idea how the Argentinians had got hold of an Ian Campbell album, but they owed me royalties and they would be donated to a fund for injured survivors of the coming war.So I made it into "The Sun"..but it was a very scary moment..if they'd decided to play the story anothr way I could have been lynched. So thank you for singing it Rick...but be careful, PLEASE!