In the 80s, in the cover band I was in, we'd slip in original material. If you didn't say anything about it, people just didn't care. Sometimes they'd ask where that came from and you'd tell them, but you still had to play a bunch of Willie, Waylon, and Merle.
50 Words of Snow just didn't seem to have the complications that quite a lot of albums have. It felt to me like it had this very good flow of energy.