Lyrics, Titles, and Latin March 18
As Charles pointed out yesterday, the patience of the members of the band seem to be running a bit thin right now. This, I think, is occuring because we are forcing ourselves to look very critically at what we do throughout this whole recording process, and that leads to bruised egos. Thankfully we each possess a healthy amount of ego, so it takes a while for any of us to be torn down to the point where we can’t get anything accomplished.
However, this is all inevitable. We have to scrutinize ourselves as harshly as possible in order to make sure we come up with the best possible product; something that we are happy with in the end. In the past, as Charles I have gone through this process many times together, we have done a poor job at REALLY looking at what we do in all aspects of our music. Lyrics have never been our strong suit. This is not because we don’t like writing lyrics or that we are particularly bad at it–we just have never focused our energy on it. I’ve always fealt I had a lot more to learn and hone in terms of my songwriting apart from lyrics. But this time, we all think we should make every element of the album the best it can be.
This brings me to the album title. Do you know how hard it is to come up with an album title that is not awful? Even in the event that you find one you like, eventually you will hate it as you say it to yourself over and over again. For a while we were agreed on “Something Much Louder”. Then the following problems occured:
1) Is the album louder? Louder than what?
2) The phrase “Something Much Louder” does not roll off the tongue.
3) Charles does not like adverbs, and apparently has a problem with qualifying the degree to which volume has increased as it relates to “something”.
4) The phrase has begun to haunt me. I wake up from sleep with my mind racing, thinking,”Should it be ‘much more loud?’ or ‘Something much more louder?’ or ‘Something more loud?’. My brain can no longer evaluate the grammatical accuracy of these statements.
So we’re going to switch gears, find something we like better.
Until we hate it.