On Choosing a Name for Your Indie Band

I was going to blog about the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest, but I'm waiting for clips of the performances to show up on YouTube. In the meantime, I thought I'd offer some advice for budding musicians: don't name your band after a historical figure unless you're sure that you're going to be more famous than whomever you're referencing. The key is the first result on a Google search of the name. One one hand, Franz Ferdinand. On the other hand, Cotton Mather. (You do better by adding "music" to the search, but why ruin a perfectly good blog post with logical thinking?)

Cotton Mather is/was (are they defunct?) an Austin power-pop (and, no, I really don't know what power-pop is) band. I'm familiar with exactly three of their songs (admittedly all from watching the TV show Veronica Mars). And, you wouldn't know any of this from Wikipedia (why have you failed me, Wikipedia?). They have exactly one song available on iTunes. So, as a public service (one of their CDs would make an excellent present ... you know, to me), this is what I've collected from the internet on Cotton Mather:

You can hear some of their songs on a myspace page (put up, I suspect, by fans and not the band), including "Lily Dreams On," available on iTunes off Veronica Mars (Original Television Soundtrack) (it's the song that plays over the incredibly awesome dream sequence that is the second-to-last scene of the first season).

The two songs featured in the most recent episode can be found here and here. You can hear the actor Paul Rudd sing the first of these songs, "My Before and After," on this myspace page. If you're listening to the second of these songs, "Payday," and want to find the lyrics (and guitar tabs! hee!), I've tracked them down to here.

If you're too lazy to click on any of the links, let me say that "Payday" is an awesome song, a cross between the Beatles and Squeeze if they sang in the mid-90s, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" for Generation X:

They don't have a future but they do have a wage
Cause a job's not one of those things that gets better with age