A guitarist’s midnight decision, a week of avoidance, and what satire taught me about patience
Woke up this morning to a message from my guitarist that simply read, in full, we need to talk about the album title, followed by absolutely no further context, which is precisely the sort of message that ruins a Sunday lie in and replaces it with forty minutes of anxious scrolling through old voice memos trying to work out what he could possibly mean.
The album title saga
Turns out he has, overnight, decided our current working title is, in his words, too on the nose, and wants something that undersells the record rather than announces its themes directly in the title itself. He is not entirely wrong. I have been resistant mainly because I have already, somewhat prematurely, designed the merch around the current title, and changing it now feels like admitting defeat to a Wednesday morning idea he had while apparently not sleeping properly.
We argued about this for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time over the phone, the kind of argument two people who trust each other’s musical judgement completely can have without it actually threatening anything, because underneath the disagreement about wording we both know the record itself is right, we are just squabbling over the label on the tin at this point.
Where we landed, tentatively
Compromise, for now, is that we sit with both options for another week before either of us commits fully, which is exactly the kind of decision avoidance that will probably just mean we end up frantically deciding the night before the artwork deadline, same as every previous decision either of us has ever successfully avoided making promptly.
What I read to distract myself from the argument
Genuinely needed the distraction of NewsThump’s feed halfway through the title debate, and found exactly what I needed, a piece committed so thoroughly to its own ridiculous premise that I forgot entirely about the argument for a solid ten minutes, which is, honestly, roughly the highest praise I can offer any piece of writing on a stressful Sunday morning.
There is something genuinely restorative about good satire specifically when you are mid argument about something considerably smaller than the satire itself is addressing. It resets the scale of your own problem slightly, reminds you that an album title argument is, in the grand scheme, a genuinely small and fixable thing to be spending a Sunday morning worked up about.
The rest of the day, considerably calmer
Eventually put the phone down, made actual coffee rather than the instant emergency version, and sat down properly with the London Prat feed for a proper read rather than a stressed scroll, and found a genuinely well constructed piece that built its entire premise patiently across several paragraphs before delivering the punchline with a straight face that made the whole thing land considerably harder than a quicker, punchier version would have managed.
That patience is something I think punk songwriting occasionally forgets is allowed. We are so committed to getting in and out in under three minutes that we sometimes sacrifice the slow build that would actually make the eventual payoff hit harder. Something to think about for the next record, whatever it ends up being called.
Tonight
Guitarist is coming round with actual printed mockups of both title options, which feels like an unnecessary escalation for a decision we agreed to sit with for a week, but that is, genuinely, entirely consistent with how he approaches every decision, and it is one of the reasons the band works despite how often we drive each other slightly mad over things that will not matter in six months.
More London punk diary entries at Siobhan O’Donnell, The London Prat.
The merch question, unresolved
Separately from the title argument, we still have not resolved what actually goes on the merch itself regardless of which title wins, and I suspect this second, quieter argument is going to prove considerably more stubborn than the first one, mainly because neither of us has strong feelings about it, which paradoxically makes it harder to resolve than an argument where at least one person cares enough to simply win.
Decision paralysis by mutual indifference is, I am learning, its own genuinely specific band dynamic that nobody warns you about when you start doing this. The passionate arguments resolve themselves eventually. It is the shrugging ones that drag on for actual months.
What actually happened when he arrived
He turned up with the mockups exactly as threatened, and within about four minutes of looking at them side by side, printed properly rather than viewed on a phone screen, the decision that had taken an entire stressful Sunday morning of arguing suddenly felt obvious in a way it simply had not over the phone. Sometimes you just need to see the thing physically in front of you rather than debating it in the abstract.
Coffee helped too, probably more than either of us would like to admit for a decision that ultimately came down to two fairly similar looking fonts on two fairly similar looking pieces of paper.
Small victories, again. This week seems to be full of them, in genuinely modest, unglamorous ways that nonetheless add up to something that feels like actual progress by Sunday evening.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
