Welcome to yet another edition of Who Named the Band?

Our guest this week is Live, opening for Nickelback on Sunday at Rexall and second only to the British band the Music in the annals of perfectly generic band names, plus the Band.

Live frontman Ed Kowalczyk takes credit for writing the word "Live" on a piece of paper, but alleges that fate took over.

"We put a bunch of names in the hat," he says. "I didn't shake the hat."

Live has lived with the pluses and minuses of the name ever since. On one hand, it's camouflage. Ed goes on, "I met Shawn Fanning from Napster a few years ago and he said, 'It's pretty amazing. Your name immunizes you from being downloaded.' If you put 'Live' into Napster, you get 50 versions of Stairway to Heaven live by Led Zeppelin before you even get to a Live song."

On the other hand, it's hard to Google.

The interesting thing here is an account of how strangely resistant bands are to being named. Try it yourself if you don't think so.

"I'm so moved by this band," Kowalczyk says.

"I was 19. It was my whole world. It still is. And the idea of actually naming it was just so the opposite of where I was at. It seems so pretentious. I just couldn't do it. I thought, wouldn't it be great not to have a name?"

Great, but impractical. The name Live was approved because "we can fill this name with whatever we want" - a promise largely fulfilled over the band's decade-plus career.

Even harder to market was the band's sudden and bizarre shift into heavy metal - but that was an illusion. Throwing Copper was the band's massive-selling breakthrough in 1994 that showed the Pennsylvania foursome merely flirting with metal, while the followup, Secret Samadhi, seemed to cement the reputation - thanks largely to the song Lakini's Juice, a work of beautiful ferocity and by far the most powerful song Kowalczyk has ever come up with. Kowalczyk is actually closer to hippie than metalhead, but in one tune he went from being compared to Michael Stipe to channelling a particularly anguished Kurt Cobain.

Live has not since done anything quite like Lakini's Juice - and that includes the new album, Songs from Black Mountain, out in April - which may come as a disappointment to some since the song was such a bit hit.

"It was kind of like a storm that came through and left," Kowalczyk says.

"That record really stands out as a departure moment, where we just got real heavy, as heavy as we've ever been, and I got real scary in the lyrics and wanted to be weird for a record. I wanted to take a break from meaning."

He admits there was that expectation among some fans. Clearly, Live is not selling the bazillions of records it used to, but it could be argued that they wouldn't be around at all anymore had the musicians not been free to go any direction, to "fill up" their silly non-name with anything. Rock bands these days tend to have short shelf-lives - one big debut and it's all downhill. Survival must therefore depend on something other than trying to duplicate your big hit.

Kowalczyk says all of Live's past side-paths made it possible for Songs from Black Mountain to be the album it is - the most "pure" Live album ever made. The first single, The River, is shortly to be released to the radio. It sounds like Live, but what does that mean, exactly?

"The ethos I always believed in is to always keep changing," the singer says, "Not changing for the sake of changing, but allowing yourself to change if that was the pleasure, and to never sacrifice that to be commercial, to just make, say, Throwing Copper Part 2 because it sold a lot of records.

"That time period of my life, that was the absolute antithesis of what we wanted to be. We've never been a punk rock band, but I really think punk rock is all in the attitude - so we had a really punk attitude at the time: No matter what, I'm going to do what I feel like I want to do and not listen to anybody else."

That said, the songwriter still gets a kick out of finding out what everybody else thinks after the record's done.

"One of the most exciting things about being a songwriter is that you watch these songs come from this really private environment and then you unleash them like seeds upon thousands and thousands of people and you watch how they're received.

"It's an exciting experiment. What will they take from it? Is it going to be what I thought or something completely different?

"It's almost like being pregnant. What's going to happen?"

Live has yet to release a live album, by the way - it probably won't be called Live Live, but you never know.