You can buy an overpriced vintage perfume bottle on Craigslist or search for apartments in Bushwick disguised as East Williamsburg. Or, if you are Somer Bingham, you can find band members. That’s how the solo singer and guitarist met Dan LeMunyan, now the drummer in the Bingham-led band Clinical Trials. LeMunyan and Bingham met through Bingham’s online listing in the spring of 2009, and the inperson meeting that followed went better than either party could have anticipated. “We decided to get drunk, make music and be happy together,” LeMunyan says. Read more Read it in print

On his worst days, Chris Otepka says it sounds like he’s standing under water. Most days though, his ears are just hypersensitive to sounds. Otepka, who turns 30 next week, is the former guitarist and lead singer of the now-defunct indie rock band Troubled Hubble, a group founded outside of Chicago in 1999. Otepka and the band played together for six years, performing more than a hundred shows a year at their peak. Troubled Hubble was never a quiet band, but Otepka says that as the years went on, the group got progressively louder in its live show, with the mentality being “crank [the volume] until the sound guy says it’s too loud.” Read more Read it in print

IT STARTED OUT as a joke. Ana da Silva and Gina Birch, students at Hornsey College of Art in London, were hanging out in a bar in 1977, talking about starting a band.The two concert rats attended shows at least three days a week, watching bands like The Clash, The Slits, Talking Heads, Television and the Ramones, and concluded that in order to start a band of their own, “You just need to know three chords,” da Silva says. Da Silva played guitar, so Birch bought a bass, and they, along with a couple of friends, played their first show as The Raincoats that same year. Read more Read it in print

Its tough to shake a nickname. Meric Long and Logan Kroeber began a tour with Austin band Peter and the Wolf under the name Dodo Bird, but by the tours end, the duo had a new title. Red Hunter, Peter and the Wolfs founder, kept referring to us to our faces as The Dodos, Long says. Read more Read it in print

STARFUCKER NEEDS A new name. From radio announcers fumbling around the title to tour billing issues, the moniker has become a hindrance to the band. “There are so many people who won’t work with you,” says band founder Josh Hodges. Hodges, at 30, is the oldest member of the four-person group, whose pulsing electronic pop music is known to cause spontaneous dance parties, and he knew that naming his original solo project Starfucker could stunt the band’s potential for growth in the public eye. “The name was intentionally stupid and self-sabotaging,” he says. Read more Read it in print

IF THE BUILDERS and The Butchers were going for accuracy in a band name, The Buskers would have been a more appropriate title.The five-man band started out on the Portland, Ore., music scene by setting up shop on streets and playing sparse, reverbfree, genuine Americana music to whomever would listen. Read more Read it in print

Suckers is not a “the” band.The Brooklyn group chooses to omit the serious-sounding article in favor of just Suckers, which befits the jovial quartet comprised of friends and family members. But before taking on the name Suckers, the band went by the admittedly corny name Feelings, inspired by a friend of the band who “doesn’t have any,” says lead singer Quinn Walker. “I think we took it seriously for a week,”Walker says.The group soon changed to Suckers, as it was the first name that satisfied all members—though not everyone is a fan. “My mom doesn’t like it,” says multi-instrumentalist Austin Fisher. Read more

Michael Angelakos may sing in a wild falsetto, but like Rush’s Geddy Lee and other pop-rock castrati before him, he has a perfectly normal speaking voice. Read more Read it in print

If being a musician is supposed to be a lackadaisical career choice, no one ever told Geoff Farina.The singer, songwriter and guitarist has been in a variety of bands, composed music for films and participated in a musical archive preservation project. He has performed on dozens of recordings, played more than 1,000 shows and coowned a space that gave broke artists a place to live and work. Read more Read it in print

Nathan Larson and his wife, Nina Persson, seem an odd musical match. Larson was weaned on hardcore and played in the post-punk outfit Shudder to Think. Persson is the petite, blond Swede who fronts The Cardigans, the band unfortunately best known for the pop-sugar song “Lovefool.” Larson and Persson met around the time the song took over late-’90s radio in the United States, a credit to the soundtrack release of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. “It was super annoying ’cause [that song] was everywhere,” Larson recalls. Read more Read it in print