Naming songs and albums is an interesting business, I think. There are probably a billion ways to go about arriving at titles but I figured I'd share my approach and thinking on the topic.
This has more or less come up since one of my favorite bands, Marillion, just put out a "guess the new album title" mini contest for their fans by supplying us with the initials of the words in the title (in this case, it's "AHBID") and we get to guess the actual title. As you can maybe imagine, I think I failed miserably. I mean, I racked my brain for at least a couple of hours, and then I even combed through the Thesaurus. It was pure hell AND my answers were still borderline ridiculous.
I don't know how Marillion comes up with their titles exactly but I will tell you this, and it may slightly be a shock: I put almost no thought whatsoever into my titles. Now, let me step that back just a bit... It's not that I don't think about it at all, it's just that I usually let the title come to me rather than me going to the title. In other words, the first thing that comes to my mind that makes sense - voila! That's the title.
I know this seems a bit strange considering I'm someone who deeply weaves themes and songs together in an almost concept album sort of way but that's the truth of it...I probably spend the least amount of time on the actual song titles. Album titles aren't much different for they usually just come to me without any real searching or struggle. Even the band names I come up with have pretty much the same process, although I may spend months debating if I actually like the proposed name (that's a whole 'nother story).
I particularly like working with instrumental song titles since there's truly no boundary or expectation whatsoever. If you want to call a song "Lemon Curd", well, you can since no one really knows what lemon curd should sound like and no one's going to be singing it as a refrain in the song. Now that I think of it, I might need to write that title down...hmm.
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