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The Naming of Cats

Interestingly enough, it proved substantially harder to settle on a name for the album than it was to choose many of the songs it would include. After all, no single song was going to define the album, while the name would be the first thing that many people had to form an opinion about. It had to be catchy. Interesting. And, most importantly, it had to fit the album.

This was going to require some thought.

Original Impressions

For a very long time, the plan was to call the studio album This Is My Town, thus giving it a very clear 'title song', and summing up the fact that most of the songs are sort of small-town-strange -- little pieces of places that probably never existed, but were somewhere you could see on a clear day when the wind was right. 'This Is My Town', 'Sycamore Tree', and 'Pretty Little Dead Girl' all happen in the same small town; 'Country Song' is the story of a small town with a big problem, and 'Take Advantage of Me' and 'Earthquake Weather' are set close enough to one another that you could argue for them sharing a township. It seemed like a good way to describe the album, quickly and without too much fuss.

Unfortunately, while some people very much liked the name, the ones who didn't like it really didn't like it. 'Egotistical', 'insipid' and 'too specific' were all phrases that came up during discussions of the album's name; several folks insisted that it was vain, because it claimed ownership of an entire town. (This kinda confused me, but you know what? My role in life is sometimes to accept that my perceptions come from an angle no one else knows how to find, and to react accordingly.) We needed a new name. But what to call the album?

Examining the various songs didn't prove as helpful as I've hoped, as none of them really jumped up and said 'me, me, I am the perfect song title'. Ironically, a lot of people liked the idea of calling the album Earthquake Weather, which would have been positively awesome, yes, if not for the Tim Powers book of the same name. D'oh. Almost as many suggested calling the album Still Catch the Tide, which was a bit problematic, given that 'Still Catch the Tide' is the only song on the album that I didn't actually write. Ooops.

I ran a series of online polls, looking for an album name, and found that people were divided along about a dozen different lines, all of which were logical and justified and made sense...and none of which were right. None of them said 'the album you have just made' to me, which was really where the big problem came in: I needed a name that defined the album. And I wasn't finding it.

Some Stars Fall Home

Without a well-defined 'title song', I began mining the lyrics of the songs confirmed for inclusion on the album, looking for something -- anything -- that spoke to me coherently of the album and what it meant.

I finally found what I was looking for when I got to 'Paper Moon', and the very first verse:

I don't want to live where the sky is small;
I want to write my name across the stars.
So you can follow me through all the ports of call,
You can hear my story in a thousand bars...
But that doesn't mean I'm gone for good;
Some stars fall home, and this one still could.
So tell my lover I could be home soon.
He can make his wishes on the paper moon.

That's what this album means to me. Maybe all stars eventually fall, but some of them get lucky; some of them fall home.

I did.