Well they do say that music has an extremely strong tie to memory, in the same way that smells do. So if I'm listening to a song and it speaks inspiration into my mind, I form a pretty strong attachment between said song and memory. It's like listening to the music you liked in highschool, and having the memories flood back. Same concept.
I can sympathize with getting caught up with names. They are awfully difficult. I don't mess around with invented place names too much, but for characters, I have a method for both getting a name and moving on quickly. Assuming I know at least two basic criteria about a character, this is my method:
1. Determine their basic character traits: personal history, culture they're from, role in the story, etc. I'm talking the birds eye view. You don't need the nitty gritty personality details.
2. Go to this website:
http://www.20000-names.com/3. Pick the first one that broadly aligns with the above criteria, and slap it in there. You can always change it later, but as long as you don't hate it, you're probably fine keeping it. Your readers won't care.
My only other word of advice is to make sure it's not a nightmare to write. You don't want to write a name that's 15 characters long with a bunch of apostrophes unless there's a damn good reason to.