band_name nr we're going to put a patent on "single signal." 250423 ... raze there's a book i've never read, though i caught the better part of the film adaptation on television something like a decade ago. the main pulse of the story has to do with a teenager who gets a job keeping the books for a group of railway workers in the northwest territories only to butt up against a corrupt foreman who wants him to fudge the numbers for his own benefit. if anyone dares to question the foreman's authority, he exiles them to the bush, leaving them to fend for themselves without food or shelter while pocketing their pay. there's also a cook who's a self-appointed oracle of doom. basically, it's your typical romantic comedy. in the movie, the outcasts are referred to as "garbage eaters". self-explanatory. and also pretty banal. in the book, they're known as "the wilder few". it was pretty clear the movie simplified things and lost a lot of whatever magic the language of the novel generated. like i said, i've never read it. but some things you can just sense. the more i turned that phrase over in my head, the more i found i couldn't shake it. the wilder few. i googled it to make sure no one else was using it for anything. nothing turned up. i thought it would make a good band name. it's simple enough, but there's something evocative in there. i was trying to record an album with my friend adam at the time. the trouble was he could never let anything just be. he would spend an hour playing the same three-note bass line over and over again because he kept hearing mistakes that didn't exist. in the end, he would hand me the bass so i could record the part myself. i would nail it in one take. then he would tell me i was playing it wrong. we aren't friends anymore. he developed a mean streak over time. or maybe it was always there and i didn't see it soon enough to save myself from getting splashed with some of the acid that pooled on the soft spoon of his tongue. thinking about the way he treated his father is still almost enough to cause me physical pain. it's the sort of thing the expression "elder abuse" was invented to explain. he said some vile shit to me too, when all i ever did was try to be there for him in whatever way i could. i offered to play a benefit concert for his dying cat at a time when i'd effectively retired from live performance. for his part, he acted like it was a massive inconvenience to drive me and my dad to the grocery store when we had no money and our car had been repossessed. for his birthday, i bought him the sega genesis his mother never let him have as a kid. for mine, he gave me a comic book that had nothing to do with anything that interested me. you get the idea. even with all that was awful between us, we came up with some good material. when it looked like we might be onto something, we started brainstorming band names. every time i came up with a name i liked, adam would shoot it down for some arbitrary non-reason. i was convinced it would be different this time. the wilder few felt like a keeper to me. he said, "that's stupid. it doesn't fit with the music we're making." and that was the end of the discussion. here are some of the band names he thought were better than any of mine: caligula face ghost fucker madhouse grope sliding root fissure i don't even know what half that shit is supposed to mean. it felt like i was trying to come up with a name that had some meaning and he thought the whole thing was a joke. but that wasn't it. he honestly believed those were good titular umbrellas for a creative project. he was shocked — shocked! — to learn i didn't think ghost fucker was our ticket to the big time. i stopped trying after a while. the whole thing fizzled out a few songs in. at one point, i thought of using the wilder few as the title of a solo album instead of keeping it on ice for a two-man band that was never going to go anywhere. it looked like i might be able to get jeff lemire to make the cover art for a hot minute — he wrote a very nice response to the email i sent him and said he was interested — but he wouldn't quote me a price. and i couldn't get him to acknowledge me again after that first little spark of false hope. it was a nice dream, anyway. i was never really sure what those words meant to me. i think i know now. i think the wilder few are those rare human animals who are still untamed. the ones who feel everything with so much intensity a raindrop is a torrential downpour. who love with every cell in their bodies no matter how badly they've been broken. they hear the call of the world outside because they recognize the worth of what's still wild in them. i think it's us. we're the wilder few. 250424 what's it to you? who go blather from