When my wife sends me to the basement to practice guitar she tells me not to take it personally and surmises the reason James Taylor and Carly Simon broke up was because she told him if he played Fire and Rain one more time, she was leaving, yet he continued to play it. I guess that is her way of saying that people will get tired of listening to you no matter how good you are, if you overdue it.

When I go back over songs I wrote 10 or 15 year ago, I often find that I am repeating the same message in different ways either within the same song or in another song I've written. And what I have concluded from this is that I wasn't really happy with any of the ways I had written it or I would have chosen a fresh topic, or added more substance to the lyric rather than repeat the same thing in different ways.

I favor open mics to message boards. Everybody gets their 2 or 3 songs and the variety, both good and bad, helps keep things fresh and the feedback you get from a live audience tells you right away whether or not your song is worth polishing. The other thing I find very telling, is which songs you choose to play when you get up in front of the audience - it's not always the ones you thought were so great when you first wrote them

Sorry if i got off topic a little, but I think you can tell from my comments I favor a modest volume