Eiffel 65, the band I named myself after
A Europop CD I rediscovered home alone in eighth grade pulled me back into music, carried me through a quiet stretch, and handed me the name I used online for years.
On the old DragonSiblings forum I went by Maury. People assumed it was a middle name. It wasn’t. I named myself after Maurizio Lobina, the keyboard player in Eiffel 65, because by the time I made that account the band had already done me a pretty big favor.
Here is how it started. I loved “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” from the day it came out. In sixth grade we had a science assignment where you took your favorite song and rewrote the lyrics, and a friend and I made our own version of “Blue.” Our teacher actually taped it. I have no idea what we wrote, the lyrics are long gone, and that is the one piece of all of this I genuinely wish I still had.
Then I drifted. There was a stretch in middle school where I wasn’t really listening to much of anything, a lot of my friends were moving on, and it was a quiet couple of years. Nothing dramatic, just the ordinary low hum of being thirteen and not sure where you fit.
What pulled me back out was dumb luck. I was home alone one afternoon in eighth grade and found an old Europop CD lying around. I put it on and it was like someone flipped a light back on. I opened the case and actually looked at the booklet for the first time: three guys, one of them with his hands open wide, like he was waiting for you to catch up. I wanted to know who they were. So I did what you did in 2002 and asked Ask Jeeves, found eiffel65.it, and saw they had a new album out called Contact.
I ordered Contact off Amazon, and a week later it showed up on the front porch. I spent basically that whole summer listening to it on repeat and, somewhere in there, making a new set of friends. The music didn’t do that by itself. But it was the thing playing while I found my way back, and that counts for something.
A while later, when a few friends pulled me in to build a website and it turned into DragonSiblings, I needed a handle. I picked Maury. Of course I did.
I still have a standing daydream from back then, written down in my own teenage words: to sit down with the band someday, in Italy, and just say thanks. I haven’t done it yet. But I like that the kid who wrote that put it down like a plan instead of a wish.