Jonathan Coulton: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 03:43, 30 July 2006
Jonathan Coulton is an esoteric folk rock singer-songwriter. He was first featured singing "Midnight Train to Georgia" with the Yale Whiffenpoofs. He is now the Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science as well as the Musical Director for The Little Gray Book Lectures. Coulton is best known for his light-acoustic cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot hit song Baby Got Back and an original piece Code Monkey.
He is the author of a 5 song set called Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms that was commissioned for the September 2005 issue of Popular Science. His most recent work at Popular Science is on a podcast for the magazine, appropriately entitled the PopSci Podcast.
Coulton accompanied John Hodgman on his list of 700 Hobo Names promotional track for Areas of My Expertise as the guitarist (he was referenced as "Jonathan William Coulton, the Colchester Kid" in said work). Coulton has also been referenced in Hodgman's work with The Daily Show; a Jonathan Coulton of Colchester, Connecticut is Hodgman's pick to win an essay contest on defeating the Iraqi insurgency [1].
Most of Coulton's songs focus on intellectual, "geeky" topics such as a man who is "de-evolving" into a monkey, a strange loner who dreams of destroying the world and giving half-monkey, half-pony monsters to his girlfriend, and the dangers of bacteria. They generally feature Coulton's characteristic crooning vocals accompanied by guitar, drums, and occasionally the accordion, harmonica, mandolin, or glockenspiel.
Coulton releases many of his songs free on his website [2], though all of his original songs fall under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Discography
- Smoking Monkey
- Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
- Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms
- Thing a Week I
- Thing a Week II
- Thing a Week III
- Thing a Week IV
- Thing a Week V (In progress as of July 29, 2006.)
Other Songs
Jonathan Coulton also releases other songs under "The Little Gray Book Lectures," a podcast; "Thing a Week", an ongoing experiment in which he releases one song per week; and "Other Experiments," songs that he writes in his free time. He received a good deal of attention for his October 14, 2005 light-acoustic cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot hit song Baby Got Back. Additionally, one of his Thing a Week tracks, Code Monkey, was featured on Slashdot [3] on April 23, 2006 (see code monkey).
Videos
Since Jonathan Coulton uses Creative Commons for licensing, others are free to use his songs in their own works. As a result, a number of music videos have been created using his songs. Machinima such as Mike "Spiff" Booth's videos for Re: Your Brains and Just As Long As Me are created using computer generated graphics from games such as World of Warcraft or The Movies. There are also videos in the style of Coulton's Flickr which use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr as a slideshow accompaniment to the song. The Jonathan Coulton Project [4] (also known as JoCoPro) has created a number of these.