New Year's Eve ('soundtrack' for a poem)

For a meeting on new year's eve I am writing a little piece that will be played as a soundtrack for a poem: the poem will simply be shown as text (in a 'movie') on a large screen (so no reading out loud or anything) and you will hear this music. I'd like to know if everything is a bit in balance or not! I won't post the poem because it is in Dutch and this post is about the music, really... but the first part is about looking back and seeing things weren't pretty, the second part is about the upcoming year and hope mixed with scepticism and the third part is some sort of prayer for guidance in the new year. Something like that. (The poem was written by my father who passed away 5 years ago.) But as I said, right now I only want to know of this piece sounds alright overall.
 
http://soundcloud.com/jeroen-van-engelenhoven/new-years-eve
 
BTW The tempo is 60 bpm throughout the piece because I am thinking about adding some sort of countdown clock in the 'movie'.

The intro is really nice. It's a bit loud though. It sounds like it's distorting.

Nice mellow groove. Again, the strings are too loud IMO.

I really like this track though.

Well done!

Thanks for listening and the comments! It's funny that some say it's loud and even distorted because I did use Boost 11 but with a lower setting than I often use...! Quite often the Boost 11 limiter has to kick in on my projects but not on this project, where it only kicks in once, and a little bit too, at one point near the end. The wav doesn't look 'loud' too. Maybe it is because I had to raise the volume of the strings quite a bit in order to get things in balance... don't know... Maybe I should lower Boost 11 even more...?

Thanks, I enjoyed listening to this. Really great job on all the instruments. I don't hear the distortion but I might be inclined to try the initial string section slightly lower in volume. That might make the transition into the full sound a bit more dynamic. Terrific work!

pretty cool.