Most of us have been playing covers for many years. Speaking for myself, I've never tired of doing that, and I suspect the same might be said for many others. The key is in keeping what you play fresh, learning new songs, playing familiar ones in a different key or arranging them differently.

I have written my own material, and have been published, recorded and released. I don't write nearly as much as I once did, but I still enjoy that aspect.

Cover players and writers alike all go through periods of jadedness or writer's block, it's normal. And I'm guessing that Ian is in one of those periods at the moment.

On "having an edge over the cover players," the only advantage I see there is that by writing one's own songs there isn't any expectation by the aduience for it to sound any other way, so you are freed up from having to make it sound as close as possible to the original. Of course, the flipside to that is if your original has been orchestrated and produced and become known as sounding in a certain way, then you have the task of 'chasing your own tail,' so to speak, in producing the same sound in a live situation. However, audiences seem to appreciate a different 'take' or, as is now commonly termed, 'unplugged' version, provided, of course, that it is your own song.