How I create track titles and concepts for my music

For musicians, the creative work doesn't stop at creating the music - far from it!

A release involves creating all sorts of things that accompany the track as part of submitting it to distributors... and then there's promotional material, review submissions, social posts etc. All benefit from something to convey the story of the track and give people more of a clue what it's about other than just the audio.

Here's a bit about how I approach track titles, but I suspect there must be other ways people do this which I'd be super interested to hear about!

The TDC Tunes Track Naming System

I find naming my tracks immensely difficult. So in my usual problem solving approach I developed a system as follows:

1. Spend a day or two listening to the track and writing down every single word I can think of that it means to me in a big long list.
2. Once I've got a decent list (at least 50 words) I sit down and go through them trying out combinations of them or pairing them with other words to see if any of them feel right for a track title. Sometimes I'll use a thesaurus at this point to add some other related words. Hopefully this yields at least a couple of contenders for the track title.
3. The final stage involves creating what I call Concept Text for the track. This is 1-3 sentences around the theme of the track to pair with my track title contenders to help me get a feel for what fits best, and eventually reach a final decision.
4. If I'm really stuck I make an initial cover artwork at this point with my candidate title(s) on to further help me decide if it feels right.

Concept Text

Here's the concept text for my track that's out on Friday - Traveller's Path:

The concept text not only helps me make the final decision on track title, but it's also a useful thing to have as part of the promotional material, to give to radio stations, reviewers and for social posts.

If I'm using an artist for the artwork I'll also give it to them to help them conceptualise what I'm getting at with the track. Sometimes I'll come back and modify it a bit once artwork/videos for a track are done as the concept idea may develop a bit as part of that process.

What about you?

I made this process up to help me as I tend do think and do things in quite a process driven way. I have absolutely no idea if anyone else does it like this or whether other musicians just have titles come to them magically or have completely different methods...

So musicians of Hive - I would love to know how you come up with your track titles?!

Traveller's Path is out Friday 26th November on @stickupboys Brighton Based label: Stick Up Music (@stickupofficial1)
If you use Spotify you can Pre-save Traveller's Path Now (Thank you!)