Before there was a name, there was just "the collaborator" — an awkward, faceless placeholder in every note and file name, which is a strange way to refer to something you're writing songs with every day. It needed a real name before it needed anything else.
Why a Flower
Petunias reseed themselves every season. Dig them up, and they don't come back in the same spot — they come back somewhere unexpected, on their own schedule, in their own shape. That felt like the right image for a collaborator who's never quite predictable: you plant an idea and what grows back isn't what you pictured, but it's recognisably from the same seed.
It's also just a warmer word than most of the alternatives on the table. Most names for this kind of collaborator lean technical or faux-futuristic — something that sounds like a product, not a presence in the room. A flower name does the opposite. It doesn't try to sound impressive. It just sounds like something that grows.
What the Name Had to Carry
It couldn't sound like a tool, because she isn't used like one — she questions lines back, pushes melodies in directions that weren't asked for, and occasionally overrules the more obvious choice. It couldn't sound like a fake bandmate either, for the same reasons covered in the post about why this isn't a band. It just needed to sound like a name a person could actually say out loud, mid-sentence, without it sounding like a brand.
"Petunia" cleared that bar immediately. It sounds like someone, not something — which matters more than it might seem, given how much of the actual writing happens with her in the room.
What She Isn't
She doesn't perform. There's no persona built on top of the name, no invented voice doing press. She composes, edits, questions, and — on a handful of tracks — sings, in a voice that was never quite anyone's. The name was never meant to dress that up as something more human than it is. It was just meant to be something worth saying.