If your band is among the hundreds of acts that have been in town since Tuesday for the CMJ festival, you’re surely hoping all the big record execs will remember your name. Of course, your odds are better if you were in participating bands like Angry Vs. The Bear, Ringo Deathstarr, Goat Whore, We’re Pregnant, Tiger! S — t! Tiger! S – – t!, Kill Kill Kill and Die! Die! Die! (no relation).
According to Paper Tongues guitarist Devin Forbes, however, a band by any other name is. . .still the same band.
“Band names are dumb. They’re the hardest thing in the world to think up,” says Forbes, whose Charlotte, NC, band came to town for CMJ, which ends tonight. Forbes says that he and his mates wrote down words they liked, tossed them into a hat, and drew a combination that worked for them. (They were nearly Moon Lewis, Lottie Dixon and Kings of Leonis, before discovering a more popular band called Kings of Leon had been touring with another oddly named group called U2.) Two years later, Forbes has come to like his group’s moniker.
“It’s become meaningful to a lot of us in a different ways, and that’s also how I like to view music and songwriting and art,” Forbes says. “You write something, and you may not even know why you write it. You write a song because you’re in the moment . . . and you don’t really know what it’s about, but it starts gaining meaning, and you figure out what its about.
Touching You, the guitarist of Your Boyfriend’s Band Sucks, goes by that name because, “Mr. Touching You sounds creepy.” He believes a band’s name — and apparently the band members’ stage names — is significant.
“Every band I’ve ever known has struggled to find a good name, and most never succeed, and it makes a big difference,” says You, citing the Jeff Beck Band and Led Zeppelin as examples. Though the two bands sounded very similar during the same era, according to You, “History remembers Led Zeppelin more because they had a much cooler name.”
Though Y.B.B.S.’ name was dreamed up by its founder Spunkee Brewster, You, a New Yorker whose band-naming résumé includes Puppies Hold Hands and Reese’s Feces Jr., says he’s looking into starting a service that would provide new bands with 50 titles for $20, though that service’s name hasn’t yet been decided.
Already functioning with varying degrees of effectiveness is the Web site bandnamemaker.com. Enter a word like “kumquat,” and it suggests the somewhat inviting “Kumquat Jamboree” as well as the rather cumbersome “Kumquat Ecstasy and the Jetpack Badger.
While a night of heavy intoxicants has surely led to many an interesting band name as well, Drink Up Butter Cup’s singer Jim Harvey says booze didn’t influence his band’s title. Rather, it came from driving around with his brother who’s also a bandmate.
“We kind of wonder if it’s cheesy because I drink so much and our band is called Drink Up Buttercup,” ponders Harvey, saying his band’s name reflects the “poppy” and “sinister” nature of their music: “It’s one of those things, where it sounds like a cute phrase but it can be, ‘Hey let me get you drunk and try to get you into bed.’ ”