These Days It Takes a Full Sentence to Name a Band

Band names are supposed to make a statement: Strawberry Alarm Clock was the essence of the psychedelic 1960s. But today’s rockers are taking it to the extreme.

Increasingly, especially in the world of indie rock, their names contain verbs and form complete sentences: I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. I Wrestled a Bear Once. These Arms Are Snakes. This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb. Wake the President. We Were Promised Jetpacks. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.

What’s behind it? Anna Barie, of the Brooklyn/Chicago trio These Are Powers, thinks one motivating factor is that language in general is undergoing change. “There are different ways that people are communicating now – online and texting and ‘tweeting.’ So the language is getting played with more, and that gets reflected in band names,” she says.

Pop-culturists peg as the first significant modern-era “verb band” They Might Be Giants, formed in 1982 by John Flansburgh and John Linnell as a quirky alternative-rock duo. They released the first album in 1986 and are still active, having won their second Grammy this year for Best Musical Album for Children.

“Of course a musician has to name a band before you really are a band, so the act is a huge artistic gesture made in a total vacuum,” Flansburgh says, via an (excerpted) E-mail message. “We wanted very much to be fully original, but late 1982 was a time when it seemed all the easy, cool name possibilities seemed played out. We finally gave ourselves a full sentence name: They Might Be Giants seemed fully unknowable and slightly paranoid. Perfect. In fact, ‘They Might Be Giants’ is the name of a film from the early 1970s.”

Why have some other verb bands chosen their names, and what has been the response? Here are excerpts from E-mail replies:

(*) Dan Geller, of I Am the World Trade Center:
“I actually chose the name before September 11, 2001. I was living in New York City and looking for a name for my new project. I was discussing how I like bands with location-based names. I said ‘the World Trade Center’ (and) went on to say, ‘Yeah, then I can get on stage and say I Am the World Trade Center.’”

(*) Jason Reece, of …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead:
“The name was so ridiculous that we just couldn't stop laughing at how evil it sounded as it came out of our juvenile mouths. The ellipse came later because we wanted to make the name even longer and more like a descriptive moment in a novel.”

(*) Jonathan Lee of Cut Off Your Hands:
“In 2006 we started the band under the name Shaky Hands and titled our debut EP ‘Cut Off Your Hands.’ We were forced to lose the name when a band from the USA using the same name sent us a cease-and-desist letter via our band’s MySpace page. Because we had started to gain a following in our home country (New Zealand), Cut Off Your Hands became our bands' name and ‘Shaky Hands’ the title of the first EP.”

(*) Paul Lacques, from I See Hawks in L.A.:
“We'd all been seeing lots of hawks in the skies over Los Angeles,and we decided to form a country-rock band called I See Hawks In L.A.We find that there are two reactions and two groups of people: Those who see hawks in L.A. all the time, and those who don't believe there areany.”

(*) John Lambremont, of We Landed On The Moon!:
“Our singer Melissa might have (heard) the best response so far. Last month she had a surgery where the surgeon asked her the name of her band right as she was being given the anesthesia. The last thing she heard before she was knocked out was, ‘We Landed on the Moon? Well, that's a weird name.’”

By Steven Rosen
From GRAMMY magazine, Fall 2009