Naming the Band: What does “Stands on Sapphires” Mean?

by Bethany Stobbe

How did we name the band?

It came down to a pen, a piece of scrap paper, and a 30-minute timer. We’d brainstormed band names many times before, but none of them gave us that “ah-ha” moment we were looking for. One night, we turned our phones off, sat down, and set a timer for 30 minutes. The idea was to write down as many names as came to mind in the time limit. It didn’t matter if it was silly or completely ridiculous, we just wanted to get some idea outs. So, we giggled as we wrote and sipped on an ‘inspirational’ cocktail.

As I was writing, I randomly remembered a verse in the bible I had read where it talks about a prophet seeing God standing on a street made of sapphires. I thought that was a cool mental image, so I jotted down ‘Stands on Sapphires’ and kept writing. I didn’t think much of it until we started talking together about the names we wrote down.

The “Stand”-out Choice

At the end of the 30 minutes, we took turns reading our lists to each other, making notes of any names that particularly stood out. When I read the name ‘Stands On Sapphires’, we both stopped and went “OH…. I really like that”. Then, we made a list of the 3 names we liked the best, ‘Stands on Sapphires’ making the top of it. We googled each band name we had on the list to make sure they weren’t taken already (that would have been a bummer). Luckily, none of them had been used before.

Then, out of curiosity, we looked up what verse of the bible the ‘standing on a street of sapphires’ was from. We were frozen in our place when the book of ‘Exodus’ popped up. (Trevor and I had previously had a business together called ‘Exodus’ that didn’t work out so well. Find out more about that here). We just looked at each other and just said ‘uhm.. what?! WHAT?!’ over and over again. We had shut down Exodus at this point, so in a sense, we felt that from Exodus came Stands on Sapphires, both literally and metaphorically! It was a ‘wow’ moment for us to say the least. From then on we knew we had to name the band ‘Stands on Sapphires’.

From the Ashes

Out of what we had deemed an unsuccessful attempt at being ‘entrepreneurs’ with Exodus came an amazing opportunity to do what we really felt called to do; make music. I’m a firm believer that sometimes you have to fail before you can succeed. This definitely feels like one of those situations. As we continue to make music every day, we feel like we are on the right track. It’s difficult work at times, but all the more fulfilling than anything else we have done and we’re never looking back now.

If you’d like to read our Origin Story, You can find it HERE: