Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Simple Pleasures



My wife and I share very little in common, we are in fact complete opposites and I love that. However, it's healthy to find some middle ground for both parties to meet up and share.

One of those things is the ability to sit and joke around with stupid, silly stuff which might make no sense at all but give us some of those simple pleasures in life. How Charina and I do it is by making up band names.

These happen by accident mostly but I've documented quite a few names of fictitious bands over the years we've been together because it's one of the rare occasions that my wife, who is also an illustrator to some degree, will collaborate with me and we'll actually spend some time over and genuinely have a good laugh and a great time over the concept.

For this particular piece, it was made up over the course of a week of constantly bringing up this one band name that she was stuck on, "Something, Something, Something." To which I rebutted, "Quit, quit quitting!" And then that suddenly clicked with me.

I ended up condensing the band name, which I formalized as QUITQuit-Quitting to Q3, and that they'd be some sort of New Jack Swing project who collaborates with other performers to do covers of other New Jack Swing bands (Like Bobby Brown or New Edition).

I love the album name to this one, "Skinny is for Punks."

It was originally going to be called "Fresh 'n Firm." But I couldn't quite land the concept integrated with the title so I ran with this one which I had the fortunate energy of being able to work out flawlessly.

The two guys there have names, I couldn't let the concept down so simply: The Red Panda is named Ferdinand Suyumi (synths, backing vocals, programming) and the Lemur is Ahmet Sanghira (guitar, main vocals).

I've always wanted to do this, make up mock album covers to bands that don't exist except in my mind and... I'm not sure why I never did this earlier because I've a good list of fictitious bands I could work with now and other album covers I could do of those bands.

Would be a good step to keep me in check because I merely find myself working on something periodically, as opposed to feverishly as I used to.