The Blue Wires

Tonight Viper’s Tooth, um, I mean Minor Planets, er… damn it, The Blue Wires had a rehearsal, an unusual event for a weeknight, but I digress. At that rehearsal we decided the time has finally come for us to (insert trumpets here) start recording!

That’s right, this weekend, the process of recording three songs will commence. It’s a process that frustrates my poor wife to no end, but what can you do? There’s a demand out there. Our loyal fans are chomping at the bit to get their first taste of The Blue Wires sound.

We’ve chosen three songs that we’ll hopefully have finished by the end of March. The songs are called, Like You’re A Mouse, Go Love Yourself, and Yellow Star. I’ll try and post some lyrics soon, if I remember.

Each of the songs are quite different, and each had it’s seed in a different member of the band.

Like You’re A Mouse, was a song I wrote just before putting together this band. It’s a great, at least in my opinion, rock/pop number. It’s definitely one of the strongest songs the band has, and one of our earliest as well. I believe it was the second song we actually worked on together as a band. The first being a song called, At The Speed Of Time.

Go Love Yourself, was the brain child of Peter. He came in one day with this Stone Roses-esque riff, and we just worked it up into one of our funner numbers to play. The song rocks hard, and for some reason my voice sounds a lot like the guy from the Cult. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll let you guys tell me when you hear the final recording.

Yellow Star, comes to us courtesy of Kevin the drummer man. Kevin sent the band a demo of a riff he had, and we tore it apart, rebuilt it and ended up with this Radiohead meets Silver Sun Pickups track. The title comes from me trying to come up with something to sing over the song at rehearsal and Kevin wearing a t-shirt that had a picture of, well, a yellow star on it. Inspiration, eh?

One thing I would love to share with you, our loyal fans, is the original email that Kevin sent with that demo:

“I’ve never sent a song idea to a band before, so I figured the best way to do so was to create a incredibly rushed, incomplete and out of key song idea. Maybe we can work on it? Maybe we can all just not acknowledge that this ever happened. Whatever floats your whathaveyou”

Anyway, it’s late, and my ears are still ringing from rehearsal. I’ll try and keep a log of the recording process on the site so you can follow along at home.

Well, apparently, everything! This band, is having it’s fair share of difficulties with it’s name, or rather, it’s lack there of.

When we first started this thing we jokingly called the band Viper’s Tooth, a name that a friend of mine from England suggested. We soon came to the conclusion that we needed a less ‘leather’ name. Emails flew back and forth, names suggested and names shot down. Eventually we had a naming session at one of rehearsals. We each put 5 names in a hat and had a ‘March Madness’ like competition to find the perfect name for the band.

We ended up with a tie between, Minor Planets and The Derivatives. We sought the guidance of the guy working the desk at the rehearsal space and ended up with the name Minor Planets. We were happy. We had a name! We got a website, www.minorplanets.net, put up a site, and continued on with the process of making music.

That all changed recently when a band in Michigan called Minor Planets contacted us and let us know of their existence. So clearly we couldn’t keep the name.

Now we’re back to square one again. We’re back trying to figure out a good name. We toyed with The New Derivatives, after finding another band was already called The Derivatives. Then we toyed with Viper’s Tooth again. Now it looks like we’re doing our ‘March Madness’ again on Sunday to find a name.

I would like to take this time to invite all of you out there to contribute your suggestions for band names. God knows any name has got to be better then some of the ones we’ve come up with.

So write `em in, and if we like `em they’ll end up in the ‘hat’.

Hopefully on Monday we’ll finally have a name for this thing.