Some band name meanings have a meaning that is a little bit more mundane. For this band, it’s Lincoln Park in Santa Monica, California. Founding band member Chester Bennington used to drive past the part on his way to the studio. With a little bit of spelling creativity, this band was ready to start producing.
Linkin Park combined rap and rock to help forge the nu-metal genre. Before they found this name from such an unassuming place, they were known as both Xero and Hybrid Theory. The band has been on hiatus for several years, due to the unfortunate death of Bennington.
The Velvet Underground
Just like The Doors, The Velvet Underground took their name from the title of a book. Michael Leigh penned "The Velvet Underground" about the sexual revolution that was taking place in the 1960s.
The book was published in 1963, and the band came about in 1965. They liked the name because it seemed to evoke the image of an underground cinema. It was just the kind of thing that a psychedelic band in the sixties wanted for their image.
Death Cab for Cutie
Unsurprisingly, music is big in the lives of musicians, which ends up in band names inspired by other bands. Such is the case with Death Cab for Cutie, who got their name from the fab four themselves: The Beatles.
The band's front-man Ben Gibbard said that the band's moniker came from The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour". During the movie, a band named the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band played a tune called “Death Cab for Cutie.” The name stuck with Gibbard. But, he's since said he would have picked a more obvious reference if he could go back in time.
Vampire Weekend
Before he created a band and got big, singer Ezra Koenig had the idea of making his own vampire movie, inspired by cult classic "The Lost Boys". While the movie project never materialized (making a movie is really hard), the name he came up with stuck around.
The movie would have been set in Cape Cod (which was a location that comes up a few times on the band's first album, "Vampire Weekend") and would have had a character named Walcott, a name that appeared on another song on the album. The band is known for its world-music influences and is one of the current frontrunners in the alternative rock scene.
Daft Punk
There was once a band named Darlin'. All the way back in 1993, they released a song called “Cindy So Loud,” and in the Melody Maker column that was about singles, writer Dave Jennings described the song as “daft punky thrash.” Two of the members of Darlin' (which got its own name from a Beach Boys song), Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, thought the phrase was killer enough to become the name of the new project they were working on.
Multiple decades, multiple albums, and multiple Grammys later, Daft Punk is a huge name in the international music scene, and the listening public has all but forgotten Darlin'.