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Jonathan Coulton

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Jonathan Coulton

Jonathan Coulton is a folk rock singer-songwriter. He is now the Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science magazine as well as the Musical Director for The Little Gray Book Lectures.[1] Coulton is best known for his light-acoustic cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot hit song "Baby Got Back" and an original piece entitled "Code Monkey", which is now the theme song for an animated show on G4 called Code Monkeys. A video set to his song "Re: your brains" was a featured link on Good Morning Silicon Valley. His work has also been featured on NPR's All Things Considered. He has also worked for Valve and created a theme song for Portal, Still Alive.

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, entitled the PopSci Podcast.

Coulton accompanied John Hodgman on his list of "700 Hobo Names" promotional track for Hodgman's book The Areas of My Expertise as the guitarist (he was referenced as "Jonathan William Coulton, the Colchester Kid" in said work). Coulton also can be heard throughout the audiobook version of the same book, playing the "theme" song to the book, playing incidental music, and at times engaging in witty banter with Hodgman, who reads the audio version of his 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 overpowering Iraqi resistance to American invasion.[2] The winning entry, as set to music, was then played on the program; this song, about dropping snakes from airplanes, was written and performed by Coulton.

Most of Coulton's songs focus on intellectual, "geeky" topics such as a man who is "de-evolving" into a monkey, a mad scientist who falls in love with one of his captives, and the dangers of bacteria. They generally feature Coulton's characteristic crooning vocals accompanied by guitar, drums, and occasionally the accordion, harmonica, mandolin, banjo, ukulele, or glockenspiel. He is also credited for writing the song "Still Alive", which plays at the end of the videogame Portal.

Jonathan has in the past been accompanied by Kristen Shirts on the ukulele.

Discography

Main article: Jonathan Coulton discography
  • Smoking Monkey
  • Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
  • Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms
  • Thing a Week One
  • Thing a Week Two
  • Thing a Week Three
  • Thing a Week Four
  • The Aftermath, which is still in progress.

Many of Coulton's songs are published on his website as MP3 downloads. Many of them are free, and none of them are subject to digital rights management. All of his original songs fall under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 License.

Coulton also releases other songs under "The Little Gray Book Lectures." In 2006, Coulton began touring with and co-wrote a song with comedy-duo Paul and Storm entitled "Your Love Is," which appeared on their album News to Us. They have since toured together almost exclusively, rarely appearing with any other artists.

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 as well as linked from the multi-million reader webcomic Penny Arcade[4], and later used for the G4 production Code Monkeys.

Coulton wrote and performed a song titled "Still Alive" for the ending credits of Valve's 2007 video game Portal, with vocals by Ellen McLain.

He is currently working on a new album, titled The Aftermath. Thus far, he has uploaded complete videos of the recording process for each of the songs currently written for the album to a live stream on Ustream.tv (live, and then later archived).[5]

Secondary creativity

A notable aspect of Coulton's pioneering approach to being an Internet-based professional performing artist is the manner in which he has engaged a small but loyal group of fans who actively participate in promoting him. 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 the ILL Clan's video for "Code Monkey," 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 (also known as JoCoPro) has created a number of these.

In addition to the multiple videos, the Creative Commons license has also allowed illustrations to be done of Coulton's work. Most notably is the work by graphic designer/illustrator Len Peralta, who drew a visual interpretation of each Thing A Week.[6] These images are available in a book entitled Visual Thing A Week: Art Inspired By the Music of Jonathan Coulton. Jonathan Coulton's "A Talk With George" was the winner of the Plimpton Project's song contest.[citation needed]

Thing a Week

"Thing a Week" is the name that Coulton gave to a creative experiment which ran from 16 September 2005 to 30 September 2006. In this project, Coulton undertook to record 52 musical pieces in the course of a year, one each week. This target was mostly achieved, missing only a few weeks. The objectives were: (a) to push the artist's creative envelope by adopting what Coulton describes as a "forced-march approach to writing and recording"; (b) to prove to himself that he was capable of producing creative output to a deadline; and (c) to test the viability of the internet and Creative Commons as a platform capable of supporting a professional artist financially. Early indications are that the experiment succeeded in generating a large number of high quality songs, boosting sales of music downloads, expanding Coulton's public presence and enlarging his fan base. The success of the financial objective is more difficult to judge, but Coulton was quoted in a September 2006 interview as stating that "in some parts of the country, I’d be making a decent living".[7]

References

  1. ^ "Witty Tunes Are Jonathan Coulton's 'Thing'" (accessed ) on NPR's "All Things Considered"
  2. ^ "Daily Show: Hodgman - Essay Contest" (HTML/Windows Media Player 9). Comedy Central. [[]]. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ "Code Monkey Like Fritos" (HTML). slashdot.com. 23 April 2006. Retrieved 22 October 2007. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
  4. ^ "Prinny Please" (HTML). www.penny-arcade.com. [[]]. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ Jonathan Coulton's Ustream channel. Accessed November 11, 2007.
  6. ^ http://www.flickr.com/photos/jawboneradio/sets/72057594103636347/
  7. ^ "Quick Stop Interview: Jonathan Coulton" (HTML). View Askew Productions. 2006-09-28. Retrieved 2007-02-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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