Imagine my surprise when Reverb Nation suddenly showed that I was playing gigs in southeast England!
In 2007, I started using the name “Departure From Normal” as a music pseudonym. It’s a wordy weather term–awkward to say and hard to remember. I never dreamed anybody else would ever use it for anything other than weather, let alone music. But leave it to the Brits!
A quick search turned up a boy band from Brighton UK. Daniel, Kane, Jordan and Pete are positively dreamy! Wait, no picture of Pete?! Drummers never get any friggin’ respect.
They’re mostly playing high school gigs, so not exactly selling out Wembley just yet. But, I have a vision where they blow up stateside in a few years. And in this vision, I receive a phone call from a short bespectacled barrister with dusty trousers and a cockney accent who claims to represent the DFN lads and offers me £40,000 for the departurefromnormal.com domain name. On the other hand, maybe they grow up and get real jobs, and departure from normal just goes back to being a clumsy weather term.
Meanwhile, go buy a DFN T-Shirt for your baby. Only 17 quid!
Obviously Reverb Nation is creating show listings based on an automatic search. Given the likelihood of cross-pollination, it seems like that feature ought to be turned off by default. And unfortunately, this isn’t the only place where our names are being intermingled. So, I will go back to using my own name for now. But I will also hang on to the depaturefromnormal.com domain name–you know–just in case.
