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.