YOUR QUESTION

12/15/2020 Michelle

Hi Trevor
big fan. I want to ask you about the process of naming songs. I saw the conan interview the other day where Buzz talked about that and I became curious about your own process... and also about some songs in particular. dawn's early vengeance??? Equation Of The Found Object???? liver colored dew?????????

MY ANSWER

The process varies. I have notebooks with lists of title possibilities; Occasionally, like in the case of my last duo recording with Buzz, we wrote quickly and titles had to be generated “automatically” or in the moment without over-thinking. Sometimes a title is the first thing that comes to me even before one note is written (i.e. Platypus, Egg). Other times I struggle with it even after lyrics are written. And variations in between. “Equation...” is the name of an essay by André Breton. “Dawn’s…” just came to me during some Bush-era Gulf War shit. And “Liver…” was a phrase I came up with during an automatic writing session that I liked and later transferred to a list of possible titles. Sometimes I have a title-less song that needs one and then I have to find a match which is not always easy.