Eponymous

I don't think it would be a huge step to say that every song I write is about me. I can't speak for everyone, but I think that even my less obviously self-absorbed songs (those about politics &c) are very much coloured by my personality and the filter through which I view the world. And given that an album tends to be a group of songs that are written at roughly the same time, I think it would be fair to say that an album by a solo artist is a set of songs that describes their personality at the time the album was written.

So here is my theory:

A musician's name refers to a person. A musician might release ten solo albums under the same name because the person, the body responsible, hasn't changed. But the persona changes constantly. Saying that the dark Leonard Cohen of the late sixties is the same artist as the calm, spiritual Leonard Cohen of the noughties because they shared a body is like saying Radiohead is the same band as Supergrass because they shared a home town.

One solution to this would be for artists to come up with a new album title and artist name every time they release a new record, and I would have some sympathy with this "standalone" approach. But it would be a lie to say there is no continuity between an individual artist's records. So how's this for a compromise:

What remains constant should be the album title, because the subject of a group of songs is almost always the person who wrote them. The artist name should change every time (unless the artist feels ze has undergone no development since the last album), and this name should reflect the person's current personality.

I'm sure I've tied myself in knots there by trying to distinguish a person, a persona and personality (without actually looking up the relevant pedantry on the web), but I hope my point makes sense. The artist changes, but the name of the subject does not. Which is why it is quite likely that my new album will be entitled "Matt Bradshaw".