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Panic! At The Disco and the Art of Band-Naming
Sometimes simple and superb — hello, Blur! — just won’t do.
If you’re going to produce hits with arch, complicated titles like “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)” or “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” your band should have a name as cool and quirky as Fall Out Boy (after a character on The Simpsons, no relation to the family of bassist Pete Wentz’s ex-wife Ashlee Simpson) or Panic! At The Disco.
And if your band has cool and quirky name, be prepared to be asked about it … a lot. God knows I’ve done a lot of asking over the course of my career as a music journalist.
I recently interviewed 3 Doors Down for the liner notes of the 20th anniversary re-release of their 2000 album, The Better Life. It was the first time I’d chatted with them since I interviewed them for Teen People magazine in 2000, and I finally got around to asking them about the origin of their name.
It involved a dilapidated store front and a sign pointing to something “3 doors down.” Voila! Instant band name.
“Kryptonite,” the title of 3 Doors Down’s debut single, would have made a much cooler moniker, and no-one ever would have had to ask about its origin.
