Of swings and roundabouts

So I've been off work this week, partly because i've not had a proper break since the end of september, and partly so I could do some recording.
The first part of this has been achieved.
The second part, partially so.
It's been an education; I haven't used cubase for about 4 years (why bother when I had free access to the studio and an excellent engineer?) and I've got a new input box that has its own software. So a lot of time has been spent looking at screen a swearing in perplexity.
But we have made some progress so I thought I'd share a couple of rough drafts with you:
http://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/track/goodnight
http://drewstephenson.bandcamp.com/track/the-song-of-the-henchman
The first is a track that owes a massive influence to Tom McRae's A Summer of John Wayne. I didn't set out to rip it off, I had the cd in the car, had listened to it once, wrote this a fair bit later, and then it came round again (I don't use the car much and it has a 6-cd changer) and I realised how similar it was. So call this a homage if you like, to one of my all time favourite musicians. I hope he doesn't sue.
The second one is an attempt to address a balance in popular fiction whereby the henchman traditionally gets it in the shorts whilst the hero gets the girl. Terry Pratchett started it with his book Guards! Guards!, Mike Myers continued it in the movie Austin Powers and now it has life in the form of song. I suspect it will have less exposure...
Anyway, both of these tracks are just rough drafts, they haven't been mastered so you'll need to crank the volume up, and, most importantly, they haven't had any of Hilary's genius applied.
So enjoy, but bear in mind there's much improvement to be wrought.

Of course all my positive feeling about this has been completely undermined by sitting here listening to Anais Mitchell's Young Man in America which just makes me feel completely useless.

Brand New Year, Same Old Problems

So, way back in 2008 (seems a surprisingly long time ago now) I released the Digging for Bones EP, and later on that year started recording a full length album. 2009 turned into a difficult year to keep things going and it wasn't until November that we had another chunk of time in the studio and managed to make some real progress.
I reckon we're about 85% there now, give or take a half percent either way, but the biggest problem still hasn't been addressed.
I refer, of course, to the problem of how to sell the bloody thing when it's finished.
And they do have to be sold. The idea that you can give away your recordings for free and fund them from live shows and merchandise sales is strictly for established bands with massive global fan bases. For the rest of us it just doesn't work like that.
I regularly read Tom McRae's blogs and find myself wondering that if a musician and song-writer of his calibre can't sell enough records then what chance to do the rest of us have?
So, cutting to the crux, i'm trying to decide what to do with the album when it's finished. The most cost-effective option is to release it as a download only. But most of my friends and most of the people who are into my music seem to like the CDs. Unfortunately there aren't enough of them to justify doing a CD run (i'm sitting on, well, let's just say a LOT of boxes of unsold EPs at the moment).
So i'm kind of heading towards the idea of a limited run. 100 CDs, first come, first served. We won't make a penny on a run of that size but at least it'll give the people who really want a hard copy the chance to have one and we shouldn't actually lose money this time.
What do you think?

Oh yeah, and happy new year...