you know what’s really fuckin hard?  coming up with a band name in 2009.  Even if you’re amazingly brilliant, well read, and have more internet geek knowledge than 50 nerds, chances are, most of the cool or semi-cool ideas you had for bands names have been bands that suck for a long time.  True story.  

I named my own band, Nova Clutch, years ago walking through this cool neighborhood I’d been to one other time at that moment, DUMBO.  I thought it was so mysterious and so fucking New York.  That’s basically all gone now, including the namesake of my band, which was torn down so douchebags can park their Hummers in a paved lot.  The Nova Clutch building was one of the first buildings on the waterfront at the turn of the century.  When I was leaving the neighborhood after having a rehearsal in an underground theatre with my at the time unnamed band, I looked up at this building and said, hmm…Nova Clutch…I think that’s the name of the band now.  Well, we’ll use it until something cooler comes up.  But nothing did.  And years after, I’m glad nothing else did.  It still makes me happy to think about it, especially after moving there another 6 months later, it became the spiritual home of my band (the neighborhood, not the building), and it was there that it grew (and I grew) to become what it was to become.  I haven’t lived in DUMBO for years now, and neither has my studio been there, but to this day the name continues to have more meaning for me.  Not bad for looking up and seeing a sign, literally.  

But when being asked to name new projects or other friends’ projects, damn, its HARD!  I’m sure many of you have gone through this same process, maybe resorting to dictionaries, encyclopedias, wikis, etc etc.  But to find a truly good name, it just kind of has to hit you.  Last night I named a new project, which will be announced soon, and after searching for days and weeks for something, my brain sort of combined all the things it was looking for in one name.  This was the video that led me to my conclusion: