Crush & Keep All Your Promises

I'm starting this blog mainly to have somewhere to catalog some of the backstory to the songs I write.  Since I'll be attempting 14 again in February for FAWM, I thought this would be as good of a time to start as any.

This year, so far I have written and recorded two songs.  Both of them were for Songfight!.
The first one is called "Crush".  I really didn't want to write another generic love song, and I was playing Twilight Princess a lot at the time.  It occurred to me that in video games where the main character starts in a small town and eventually ends up saving the world, most of the towns have about seven people living in them.  Then I found myself wondering if the ever-present roaming monsters that your character always has to fight the second he steps out of the town the reason for the stunted population.  Then I wondered why these towns didn't have huge cemeteries, and concluded it was probably because the monsters don't leave corpses.  Anyway, I decided to write a song about a humble hero setting out on some epic quest; rooting out the monsters and killing them where they live.  I had time to do a "full band" recording with three or four guitars, bass, drums, and a couple vocal tracks.  It came out OK, but I recorded it right after I wrote it (all in one evening) and the singing is a bit off in spots.
The second one is called "Keep All Your Promises".  Again, I didn't want to write another generic love song.  The title, in my head, had a waltzy feel, and I ended up writing a waltz.  I was practicing for a live show and had the capo on the guitar, so I moved it up to the fourth fret to get the chords to sound a bit different, and the melodies in this song came out almost immediately.  I wrote some hasty lyrics about Naruto, a character who is haunted by a very important promise that he made, that he may never be able to keep.  I recorded a live take, which was probably the second time I played and sang the song through from start to finish.  While converting it to mp3, I added some really annoying laser effects to the end of the chorus.  At Songfight!, everyone complains about guy+guitar entries and I really wanted to give them something else to complain about.  The version without the lasers is actually quite nice.  I tried to sing the song in a harder voice than I usually use, and I'm not completely disappointed with the results.