Jonathan Coulton

Here’s another find from our Public Library (I love Public Libraries…free stuff!), a CD that I picked up on a whim. Stuck it in the player on the way home, and by the third song both Cyn and I were saying “Who IS this guy? And why didn’t anyone tell us about him before?”…Some of the best eclectic Pop/Rock music I’d heard in a good while. Great arrangements, cool harmonies, with some very good playing throughout. And most importantly, really amazing, intelligent, poignant, witty songs. All, apparently, done by this one guy…writing, playing, recording, production. So who the hell IS he?

Turns out Jonathan Coulton was working in the IT field up till recently, when he decided to challenge his songwriting and production skills by taking a year off and writing, recording and producing a song a week for that year. He then posted them up on his website as podcasts. This has worked out really well for him, since he’s now writing, recording and touring full-time, and is no longer bound to the IT cubicle anymore (although he’s used it for fodder for his amazing songwriting mill). Success stories in the music biz are not all that common these days; it’s nice to see a genuinely talented person making it happen.

Coulton’s songs do owe a great debt to They Might Be Giants, another self-starter band of prodigious output and imagination (he actually opens their shows on occasion these days), although his style and perspective are somewhat different. Jonathan’s enormous songwriting universe includes an Evil Genius who’s having trouble with his current relationship in “Skullcrusher Mountain”, a strangely cheery family banished to a mining asteroid on Christmas in “Chiron Beta Prime”, an achingly sad song about a Sea Monster who loves the little ships he keeps destroying in “I Crush Everything”, and a former office-mate who’s now a Zombie but still an asshole in “Re: Your Brains”. How could anyone possibly not like that? A great deal of his work is available at his website:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
…And his documentation of that year of weekly songs is available in a series of CDs titled “Thing-A-Week”. Also, since he releases his music through Creative Commons, his fans are free to make videos of his songs, and there are a huge number available on YouTube (I’ve included several below). For an excellent perspective on the JoCo phenomenon, get his live performance CD/DVD “Best.Concert.Ever” to see him playing in front of one of his EXTREMELY enthusiastic groups of fans. As a musician, I really appreciate seeing that. Well worth watching!