Naming a band is an act of concentrated creative expression. Square Pig in a Round Hole exists to reward five favorite band names each week. Winners are (usually) listed alphabetically.
Selection is wholly unscientific and subject to whim, with a bias toward wordplay, humor, and local flavor. In most cases, I won’t know anything about the bands at the time of selection. Thanks to the Seattle Times club listings for abundant source material!
I finished National Novel Writing Month with a 45,000 word draft of a fantasy novel that’s been waiting almost 3 years to be written. In celebration, we ventured out on a dark and rainy night to far-flung Maple Valley to hear Denise Glover and Friends play two engaging sets in a genre I call pretty-guitars-without-effects-pedals. Hope they come to Seattle soon! While we wait, here is this week’s batch of creative band names:
A messy idea if taken literally but it sounds beautiful and sweet.
I have to respect a name that describes the sound right up front. (See also: Low Hums.)
I can’t think of a better description of our current moment.
Poetic and a touch melancholy. (Humorously, the listings ran them together with another band on the bill to create The Languid Current Heir Apparent, which sounds like a character in a 19th century comic novel.)
The Number Twelve Looks Like You
I always appreciate an extra-long name, especially when it’s a complete sentence, even more so when it is a touch surreal. To those of us with number-form synesthesia, this actually makes sense.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: My novel Daughter of Magic was 1 of 8 books released by Not A Pipe Publishing in 2018, The Year of Publishing Women, which also included a weekly online series of short stories by women. The best of these (18 stories representing a wide range of genres) have been collected into a print anthology, STRONGLY WORDED WOMEN, available now. The collection includes my story “Crane’s Fire” from deep in the backstory of Daughter of Magic. Makes a great gift!
Karen Eisenbrey 