Creativity Quote by Dave Haywood

Band naming, in Dave Haywood's telling, isn’t a single lightning-bolt moment; it’s a temporary way of living. The “sounds weird” qualifier is doing a lot of work: he’s admitting that this habit borders on obsessive, even a little cringe, but also insisting it’s normal if you’re inside the grind of becoming a band. You start scanning the world for language that can hold a future.

The intent is practical - he’s describing process - but the subtext is identity anxiety. Before the music has a foothold, the name is the flag you plant. It’s what you can control when everything else is still fluid: lineup, sound, scene, luck. That’s why “everything you observe and read” becomes raw material. Not because every phrase is poetic, but because the act of searching turns daily life into a kind of audition. Street signs, book titles, overheard conversation - all of it gets pulled into the same mental bucket: could this carry us?

Haywood’s phrasing (“kind of think,” “maybe”) also shows how tentative that early-stage confidence is. A good band name has to feel inevitable and accidental at the same time - discovered, not engineered. For a working musician in the 2000s and 2010s, there’s an extra pressure hovering behind the quote: branding in the age of search engines, social handles, and instant first impressions. The world becomes not just inspiration, but inventory, and the band name hunt becomes a crash course in turning attention into a public persona.