Fake Song Titles

This site was inspired by a comment from Gideon Coe (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0072l9v)
on one of his excellent shows on BBC Radio 6 Music in November 2011. 

He was playing tracks by Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) who always chose creative, seemingly 
nonsensical, titles for his songs. Gideon commented that if there was not already a fake 
Captain Beefheart song title generator on the Internet, then there should be.

Well, there wasn't... so now there is


If you are curious about the software behind this site you can find it at 
GitHub (https://github.com/craic/fake_song_titles). It is written in Ruby as a Sinatra app and
is hosted on Heroku (http://heroku.com). The code is freely available so go ahead and clone it if
you feel so inclined.


The generation algorithm is extremely simple. Verbs, adjectives and nouns were extracted from lists of
real Captain Beefheart song titles and then I added other words that seemed appropriate - as well as few that
are totally unrelated and that were added just for fun.	

Many of the real song titles follow simple patterns - two nouns, an adjective and a noun, etc. The code
picks words at random from the lists and joins them according to the patterns. Most of them
are nonsense but some would make pretty good Beefheart titles.

The approach might also be applied to other artists - The Fall, Mogwai and Underworld are three that
come to mind right away. I shall investigate.

The code was written by Rob Jones in Seattle, WA - who should now really get back to work...