Take the wayback train to High School, day of halloween. Everybody's all exicted to be able to shrik the dress code and appear instead of fashion billboards for Nike, The Gap etc, instead as their favorite martian, vampire, fairy ghoul etc. I however being the wonderful procrastinator(and sometimes still am), waited until the night before to get my stuff. Needless to say this isn't the most optimal time to go out shopping for halloween gear...all the stroes were ransacked, and all that was left was the lame broken costumes nobody wanted and for some reason lots of black and white facepaint, and silver hairspray (aside from a few gray hairs, my hair is normally dark brown). Left with no choice, and no time left, I picked them up determined to do something interesting with them. Insipration hit when I was rummaging through my closet looking for clothes to wear and found this grey longsleeved turtleneck and a pair grey gloves. I mixed the paint carefully to match the color of the clothes, and made myself one monolith of grey and silver. So when I got to school the barrage of everybody else's "oh you look so cute as a cowboy" "hey it's Joe Montana!" they saw me as asked "what/who are you'? Smiling inside from how the question applied more broadly to me in highschool (I didn't quite fit in in any particular group). I proceeded just to answer "the grey man" while blended in to the grey chalkboard we had covering the school walls (my eyes and smile doing the chesire cat thing). From that point on, I had found something relatively unique I could use as a handle. An abstraction that can describe some aspects of me on a philosophical level. A useful alternate identity if you will.
Along those lines: Grey is the color of the brain (i.e. greymatter) which is where I like living most of the time.
Grey is white and black mixed together. White can be split into all the colors
of the rainbow, and black all the colors of paint mixed together. So in a way
grey is everything, yet for most is non-descript. Depending on whom I'm around
I can be taken for grey on the outside, as I don't react with everybody in a
colorful fashion (as I am on the inside)...kinda like a grey candy coated,
colored chocolate inside M&M.
Trivially the letters (TGM) are also my initials (though out of order).
I also needed a name for my one man band (they're are some samples on my website). so it seemed like a good fit both in viewpoint of my content (many songs I write I cover opposing viewsides) and mood (mellow or somberish) also, cause in the end all of my influences are very diverse, and not easily mixed into anything else but a puddle of grey.