1st Grade:
The Bear Wolf
The Rock Brothers Band Rocks
Rock in Roll
Rocky
Rockstar
Rockin Peanuts
Fresh Beat Band
Rockin Hansen
Trouble Ones
One Man Band
Roadrunner
Cool Loud Band
Rolling Pins
Sharp Men
Hurricane Men
The Christophers
Sound Band
Soft Band
Chocolate Band
BandAid Band
Superstar
Rockin Cheetahs
Monkeypo
Band Man
Bad Boys
Rockin Cobras
Rock Around The World
Triangle Band
Rockin Ninja
Beat Band
Rockstar Band
Bandit Band
Hamburgers
Rockin Cookies

2nd grade
Rock band
The rising dead
Rock n roll band
the hard rockers
The big bad men
Rock on
The white cells
Bulldogs
Big bad band
Rock and boom band
The New Yorkers
Melody
Rock and roll together
Rock and roll friends
The crushers
Alone on the streets (dark, I like it)
The rocks
Earth shakers
The battle
Firework company
Rock n roll joy
Rock n roll hounds
The monsters
The trashers
The pain
Fire band
Star band
Hard metal
War pigs

I first heard Fountains Of Wayne in high school. My first girlfriend listened to horrible, horrible music. I mean, the worst music in the universe. But she had this CD of this band Fountains Of Wayne. Her friend was a fan of them, or knew them, or something. She said, “yeah, there’s only one good song on here” and so I knew for sure the album would be awesome. We broke up and I “accidentally left her CD in my car.”

The album was the self-titled Fountains Of Wayne, and I was immediately floored. I heard great and clever melodies, funny lyrics, and sad storytelling all in one colorful universe. FOW soon became one of my favorite bands ever, and their second record, Utopia Parkway, was even better. It was darker, more intelligent, mature. It remains one of my top ten records ever.

Their new album Sky Full Of Holes is a masterpiece. Fountains’ best songs yet. Here are some of my favorite Fountains Of Wayne tracks: Cemetery Guns / Hey Julie / Leave The Biker / A Fine Day For A Parade / Denise / Senator’s Daughter / I 95 / Summer Place

As a fun experiment, my good friend Melissa asked her elementary school students to come up with some band names. They listened to some tracks, and then got into groups and brainstormed ideas. The results are awesome. I was impressed with the creativity and intelligence of these 1st and 2nd graders. I laughed, I cried, and I’m pretty sure my brain exploded once or twice. Here they are in all their glory:

Kid’s Band Name Ideas – Day 1

1st Grade:
Baby Pie
The Fast Speed
Thunderstorm Eyes
Starry Nights Rule
Banana Sword
Hot Tree
The Princesses
The Hot Chicken Band
Werewolf Fire
Running Blood
Pizza Tree
Black and White
The Meatballs
Bald Eagles
The Black Pandas
Tears of Blood
The Hot Boy Band
The Amber Band
Werewolves of the Hot Fire
Pizza Panda
New York City is Awesome
Carebear Band
Race Dragon
The Mr. Sandman Band
Black Band
The Mosquitos
I am a Tree
Fire Rock
The Outlaws
Brake

2nd grade:
Beatbox
The Big Bad Band
Bulldogs
Fire crier
The Fire Band
Buttkick Rock
New Boys
Rockstar Baby Attack
Baby on the Roof
The Funky Monkey
You Go I’ll Go
The Bad Girls
The Lord of Gods
This is How We Roll
The Vampires
Learn How to Rock
Mario Rock
Rally rock
Say it Out Loud
Smoke Dash
I Go Where You Go
The Mini Muffins
The Awesome Rock Band
Doin the Duggy
The Jerk
Where to Go
Let it Shine
Doin the Boogie
Four the Sequences
Rock Box
Mario World Rock
Baby at the Door
The Purring Pandas
Singing Rock Music
Dark Rock
New York Rock
The Walkers
The Bad Boys
The Four Werewolves
It’s All About Me and You
I Love You
Texas Rock House
Monster Party
The Rocking Turtles
Baby Rock
Mustang
Cash Stache
Fire Skull
Texas Rangers
Snake Hole
The Adorable Dolphins

Meanwhile, I’m playing THIS SATURDAY in Provo!  Utah, Salt Lake, Provo, Orem, Logan fans, come on out!

Check out this awesome promo video, and make sure to put this on your Facebook wall! Let’s get everyone excited about the show this week!

Video created by Anaïs Saunders and Jackie Watanabe thanks guys!!

http://www.chrismerrittmusic.com/blog/another-world/

http://www.chrismerrittmusic.com/blog/audio/Mally.mp3

http://www.chrismerrittmusic.com/blog/rain-king/

http://www.chrismerrittmusic.com/blog/tarmac/

http://www.chrismerrittmusic.com/blog/she-wolf/

I want to finish a few of these songs and release them for free!  We’ll probably be done with five very soon:  One Man To An Army, On My Own, Coney Island, Bi-Polar, and Amelia.  They are kiiiind of getting close to being done. They are the first songs I’ve ever recorded that are not compromised in any way.  Pretty, heavy, heartbroken, happy, haunting, funny.

Sheherzahde is getting close to being finished, conceptually.  Most of it is demo’ed.

We’re also hard at work on The Itch, Sucker Punch, Jitterbug, Burning Baby, Shorty, The Beautiful Ms. Parker And I, Pretty Bitch, Newborn, Sherlock Holmes, Mechanical Mind, Bi-Polar…..many more……

I’m also hard at work on a side project which will be ready for unveiling soon.

I feel like this is the longest I’ve gone without releasing a new record.  It’s a desperate feeling, but I know I have to persevere to finish the most epic music of my life.

The Japanese Shinto creation myth says that Izanagi-no-Mikoto (male) and Izanami-no-Mikoto (female) were given a spear with which they stirred the water, and when removed water dripped from the end, Japan was created in the great nothingness. Although the myth is beautiful, if taken as fact (as it surely was), it’s a bad explanation.  If you varied this explanation, even a lot, it would have the same explanatory power. What if they had used a giant pair of chopsticks to stir the water instead? What if they had used humongous straws to lower the water level and expose Japan? What if, instead of people, it was monkeys who had done the stirring? None of these changes would hurt the explanatory power of the myth. It still teaches us nothing about how islands form, why they disappear, how long they have been there, when the first people got there, etc. Science – and only science – can do, and has done, those things.

Science (or, the human creative understanding of reality) has done the following:

Allowed us to fly through the sky like a bird.  Given us the power of near-instant communication with anyone on earth.  Shown us how to boil water to kill pathogens.  Allowed us to understand genes and evolution.  Cured the near-blind with contact lenses and laser surgery.  Shown us close-up footage of the ravaging storms of Jupiter.  Given us literally every object made with metal.  Cured and destroyed uncountable deadly diseases.  Given us control of warm fire.  Let us understand and even touch the moon.  Allowed us to make and transport food to sustain literally billions of people.  Given us electricity, and artificial light.  Given us music recordings.  Cartoons.  Cars.  Roller Coasters.  Skyscrapers.  Boats.  Aquariums.  Advil.  Video Games.  Maps.  Refrigerators.  Hot tubs.  Ice machines.

So that’s why I put my “faith” in science.  It’s responsible for literally every inch of progress our species has ever made.  And I’m not even exaggerating.

I think it’s important to remember your ideas are fallible.  In fact, they will always be fallible and imperfect, but you can improve them, and only through critical thought, debate, and creativity.

I’m not really a tattoo person.  I never knew why.  Not that they aren’t aesthetically pleasing or bad-ass or anything, but what idea could I possible have that I would believe true for my whole life?  Our society loves the concept of life-long, unchanging beliefs.  We find deeply held beliefs and emotions to be somehow honorable; ideas that never change or improve are considered deep and meaningful.  In realty, these stubborn ideas are destructive and inflexible, not to mention obnoxious to the rational thinker.  We want the world to have never-changing truths.  And, in fact, we find ourselves in a world that does have objective truths, but we can only hone in on them and sharpen our picture of them; we are far from seeing them perfectly clearly.

Newton, the greatest scientist of all time, discovered the basic physics governing time and gravity.  Many years later, Einstein disagreed with Newton.  He improved his concept of unchanging, flowing time and upgraded our knowledge of physical reality immensely.  Was Newton wrong?  No, just more wrong than Einstein.  But only through creative thought was each man more right than any other human on earth when they made their respective discoveries.  An incredible feat for any chimp-creature.

For the last few years, I’ve become more of a nerd than I ever planned to.  I caught the bug with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time, and Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World; since then I’ve read over a hundred science-y titles and watched hundreds of lectures and debates relating to physics and all sorts of heart-stopping, mind-bending, real stuff.  I’ve learned more on my own in five years than I did in twenty years of school.  I became interested in the reality of the universe we find ourselves in.

So, most of this time, I thought science experiments were our only peek through the keyhole of reality.  I figured that empirical science (lab testing and observation) was the epitome of rational thought, and through observation only could we hope to acquire knowledge.  In other words, only that which is observed and scientifically confirmed is worth taking seriously.  This is the popular concept of empiricism.  But that’s actually wrong.  Well, more wrong than my current held belief, that knowledge comes from explanation and creative thought, and is only confirmed and strengthened with observation.

Here is an excerpt from David Deutsch’s The Beginning Of Infinity (the best book made by humans):

Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to ‘observe’.  Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe.  This was his way of demonstrating one of the many flaws in the empiricism that is still part of common sense today.  So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees.  And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first.  It has to be conjectured, not derived.

So this deeply held scientific idea of empiricism isn’t wrong, it’s just more wrong than Popper and Deutsch.

If I had gotten a tattoo expressing something that reflected my personal philosophy in the last few years, it would have said “empirical science” (a concept that I thought was infallible and perfect). But maybe now I would be regretting it, although, more likely, I would justify my belief system to reject this new idea of creative knowledge-creation and anti-empiricism in favor of keeping and loving my ridiculous tat.

Here’s a paradox for you…a tattoo that said “No Tats For Life”.

I digress.  Here’s my point.  Don’t tattoo ideas on your brain. Oh, and um, empiricism is probably wrong. Sorry.
 

The song is called…..I’m not sure, but it’s about the late great Elliot Smith.