My move to St. Stephen, New Brunswick, has been a great one for me in a number of ways. One of these is that I’ve started getting back in touch with my musical side. In Winnipeg, I barely thought about music beyond just listening to the radio. However, the community here in St. Stephen is very, very musical and, as such, I’m finding myself getting back into that groove as well.

A few of us here have decided, therefore, to start a band. There’s 4 of us: Jacob Murphy, Holly (can’t remember last name, grrrrr) and Zoe Fitch (and me). It’s an interesting group, as Jacob and Zoe tend towards “happier” music, whereas Holly and I lean more towards Evanescence / Staind, etc types of music. Definitely heavier (musically and lyrically).

It’s also interesting, because all of us write songs (to varying degrees… asking the drummer to write a song is always a dangerous thing).

Right now we’ve run up against the challenge of naming the band. I’d never realized this was so hard. When I’d been (briefly) in bands before, it was basically the band leader who picked the name, and everyone cringed but nobody cared.

So far we’ve come up with, and rejected, the following names:

LUSH
Midnight Audition
Four Door Ford
Spindle
Frozen
Marmalade (not just another jam band)
Theory
Cadence

We’re having a really, really hard time at it. Part of it’s because I tend to like shorter names (many of the 1-word names above are mine), and I tend to forget about longer names (there are dozens of other names we’ve actually played with).

Is there a secret to naming a band? I’m not sure. I guess the most important thing is that the whole band likes it AND that you can grow into it. I don’t really believe that we need to make the name ‘mean’ anything, at least starting out. I want a name that we can grow into in some way.

All of us are pretty good musically (by which I mean if we were asked to play as session musicians in front of just about any crowd playing just about any kind of music we could do reasonably well).

I guess right now we’re just having a hard time finding “us”. I know we’ll get there, but does anyone have advice for making this transition easier?

Btw, once we have a name I’ll get a website up with some sample music pretty quickly. Our sound will definitely evolve, as we figure out what type of music we want to play (right now we’re calling it “Fusion Rock”, as it’s a mixture of rock, goth, jazz, folk, punk) and then find our sound. The band’s fairly distinctive anyways, having 2 female leads, but we really want to find something that goes deeper than that.

Ah well, that’s my “life update” for this week ;-)