What's In A Title?

Oh, dread. The titling.

Coming up with a good title for an album is disarmingly difficult. Devising album titles and artwork, if I know myself at all, should be two of my all time favorite things to do. But, all that fun changes when it actually counts.

It's fun to come up with lists of album titles and to make designs but when you get down to actually picking the right one for your real album, well then it gets difficult. You have to live with it forever.

Some people name their albums after one of their songs, in fact, I did that with my last solo record "Looks Like I'm Tall". In general, though, I like to stay away from that. I always worry that doing so would give too much weight to that particular song. The other songs might get jealous. They might beat up the named song. Then your album would be named after a beat-up, shriveled, bleeding, and whimpering little song.

For our last album, we used the name of one of the songs "The New You" as the record title and then changed the song name to "The Title Song". Clever. It was sort of a witness protection program for the song.

It's a difficult process, this naming of things. It's especially hard when a full band is involved. We want to make sure everyone is happy.

When our old band Humbert had to name "The Great White Lunchroom" we asked a poet friend for help. He gave us a sheet of paper with about a hundred titles on it. Then we each wrote down our favorite three on a piece of paper. "The Great White Lunchroom" was the only one that we all picked. Two other fore-runners were "Knock on Rope" and "Thriller".

The Fawns' last album has the perfect name "A Nice Place To Be". That came from a line in one of the songs. I've tried that approach for this album, but I haven't come up with anything just right.

I like most of R.E.M's titles. "Murmur", "Fable of the Reconstruction", Life's Rich Pageant". I like Elvis Costello's "This Year's Model" and "Get Happy!". XTC's "English Settlement" and "Drums and Wires" are good. They Might Be Giants knocked it out of the park with "Miscellaneous T". And you gotta love Robyn Hitchcock's "Fegmania", "Queen Elvis", "Globe Of Frogs" and "You and Oblivion".

I guess, pretty much, I just like the album titles of albums that I like musically. What would I think of the title "Rubber Soul" is Billy Squire had made it? I'd think it was the worst thing ever.

What are some of your favorite album titles and why?