They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants (TMBG) are an American alternative rock band formed in 1982 by John Flansburgh and John Linnell.

In the early years, the band was just Flansburgh, Linnell and a drum machine. In the early nineties, TMBG became a full band. Currently, the members of TMBG are Flansburgh, Linnell, Marty Beller, Dan Miller, and Danny Weinkauf.

They make unconventional, experimental, alternative music and in the past few years have also found success with children's music and in theme music for television programs and films.

TMBG have released 14 studio albums including the platinum Flood and the gold children's music album Here Come the ABCs. They have won two Grammy Awards including one for their song "Boss of Me", which served as the theme to Malcolm in the Middle.

 


The band's name comes from a great cult film favorite also called They Might Be Giants, which starred George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, about a "crazy" man who imagines himself to be Sherlock Holmes.

The film's title is a reference to Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. In that book, Quixote says the windmills he attempts to fight "might be giants."

 

The documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) is the story of the band.



Here Comes Science
Here Come The 123s
Here Come the ABCs 


No!
Flood
Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants
Apollo 18
Factory Showroom
The Else
They Might Be Giants

Cleveland Browns

The Cleveland Browns are a professional American football team based in Cleveland, Ohio. They are currently members of the North Division of the American Football Conference (AFC) in the National Football League (NFL).

The team began play in 1946 as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) by businessman Arthur B "Mickey" McBride.

The story of their naming is pretty unique. Owner McBride selected Ohio State Buckeyes coach Paul Brown as vice president, general manager and head coach. The franchise held a typical team naming contest in 1945 and the popular choice was "Browns" in recognition of Paul Brown. He was already an established and popular figure in Ohio sports.

Brown objected to the name and the team selected from the contest entries the name "Panthers". But it turned out that the name Cleveland Panthers was already owned by an earlier failed football team. So, Brown agreed to the use of his name.

Brown was known in those early days for having the most intense recruiting network in pro football. He used his ties to the Buckeyes and the Navy (where he had coached a base football team during World War II) to assemble a powerful team.

Arcade Fire

 


Arcade Fire is an indie rock band based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

It is fronted by the husband and wife duo of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne. The group includes an eclectic blend of guitar, drums and bass guitar, members play piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass, xylophone, glockenspiel, keyboard, French horn, accordion, harp, mandolin and hurdy-gurdy and the band members are multi-instrumentalists who frequently switch instruments during shows.

Your guess about the origin of the band's name might be that it refers to a fire in an arcade.

Well, according to Win Butler in a Rolling Stone interview, "It's not a rumour, it's based on a story that someone told me. It's not an actual event, but one that I took to be real. I would say that it's probably something that the kid made up, but at the time I believed him."


Their latest (#3) studio album is The Suburbs.



Miroir Noir  (DVD)

Stage Names

Many a performer has changed his or her name to benefit their careers. A pseudonym is a fictitious name used by a person, or less often, a group.

Pseudonyms are also known as pen names (for writers), graffiti artists' tags, noms de guerre, (resistance fighters or terrorists) and stage names, for actors, musicians and other performers.

Stage names often were used to mask a person's ethnic backgrounds to avoid prejudices or to differentiate them from other performers with the same or similar names.



Bob Dylan's real is Robert Zimmerman. Around 1960, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan". In his autobiography, Bob Dylan acknowledged that he had been influenced by the poetry of Dylan Thomas.

Explaining his change of name in a 2004 CBS interview, Dylan said, "You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free."




David Bowie was born David Jones. He changed his name to avoid confusion with David (Davy) Jones of The Monkees. It's hard to believe that anyone would ever have confused Bowie and DavyJones, but...

Bowie's debut single, "Liza Jane", was credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, but had no commercial success. After several bands and singles, he decided to use the name David Bowie after the soldier Jim Bowie and the knife he popularized, and that was the name of his first album.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_bowie

     


Though David Bowie has always had a rather androgynous personae as a performer, Wendy Carlos, the American composer and electronic musician, was born as Walter Carlos. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, including the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange.

Carlos underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1972 and was first credited as "Wendy" on Switched-On Brandenburgs in 1979. On her official site, her transition is discussed and she clearly values her privacy on the subject.
    


Not all pseudonyms have complicated origins. Eminem took the initials of his real name, Marshall Mathers, and rewrote it phonetically.