What's In A Name?

Now being the proud owner of a new drum set, I was ready to take my musical ventures to the next level. Craig and Jerry were equally excited as I was, but we had one slight problem. Since I had moved to Lord Simcoe I was about a 15-20 minute walk from my friends. Jerry was now living on Longbourne, my old street and Craig lived on the next street over from him. We had no choice but to lug all of the equipment over via skateboards. I went and met up with the boys in the "L section" and we stacked the amps and guitar cases on top of skateboards, then we began wheeling them towards my place. The walk took longer than normal as we had to take our time so we didn't drop all the gear. 

We finally got to my place and assembled everything in the basement. I had built a make shift chill room off to the side of the jam area using bed sheets as walls. In the chill room there was a couch, a table and chairs, as well as my trusted stereo system. This would be our resting place when we needed a break from jamming. There were ashtrays for smoking and incense burning to provide a sweeter smell over the otherwise musty basement aroma. 

Craig & "Bubba" in my basement.

Naturally the first thing we did was work on our previous two songs we had wrote back in grade eight, "we hate the snow" and "we hate the rain" but this time it actually sounded like a real song from a real band. We worked on those for awhile until we got them down pat. We also made a new song called "Crustacea" which was a jab at a song called "House Nation" as "House music" was becoming quite popular amongst the "popular" kids at school. The song we made was essentially a house song but we did it with instruments, not electronic devices. We made sure to set up Craig's kick ass ghetto blaster so we could record our songs and ideas for future material. 

It now felt like this was becoming something real but we were missing one key element, a name for our band. We shot around some ideas but nothing really stood out. While Craig and Jerry were brainstorming names I decided to flip through the dictionary to see if I could find something cool for our band name. I can't remember if this was done  purposely or subconsciously due to my new found love for Anthrax, but I found myself looking up words that started  with the first two letters AN. It wasn't long before I discovered a word that caught my eye, Anathema. The word sounded like it was metal worthy and when I read the definition to the boys we were all sold on the name.

anath·e·ma 

Pronunciation: \ə-ˈna-thə-mə\

Function: noun

Etymology: Late Latin anathemat-, anathema, from Greek, thing devoted to evil, curse, from anatithenai to set up, dedicate

It was related to evil and that was reason enough for us all to agree upon it. We had a band, we had some songs, and now we had a name...