Jonathan Coulton

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Jonathan Coulton
Background information <tr><td>Genre(s)</td><td colspan="2">Folk rock</td></tr><tr><td>Occupation(s)</td><td colspan="2">singer-songwriter</td></tr><tr><td>Website</td><td colspan="2">http://www.jonathancoulton.com/</td></tr>

Jonathan Coulton is a 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 entitled 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, 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]. 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.

Coulton is at home in an extraordinary variety of musical styles, from a capella to techno rock. Thematically, most of his early songs focused on bizarre or geeky topics such as a self-loathing giant squid appalled at his own capacity for destruction (I Crush Everything), a mad scientist who dreams of destroying the world and presses a gift of a half-monkey, half-pony monster on his reluctant bride(Skullcrusher Mountain), or, oddly, the mathematics of fractals (The Mandelbrot Set). They generally featured Coulton's characteristic crooning vocals accompanied by a simple backing of guitar, drums, and occasionally the accordion, harmonica, mandolin, or glockenspiel. In the material that originated in the Thing a Week project, other recurring themes may be identified. Very characteristic of Coulton's work is the humour to be extracted from the pairing of incongruous ideas. The zombie talking office-speak in Re: Your Brains is one such example. Coulton's celebratory, even tender cover of 'Baby Got Back' is another. Many songs express straightforward exuberance (Mr Fancy Pants), while others, especially the most recent ones, deftly portray complex clusters of conflicting emotions (Make You Cry and Summer's Over). With the broadening emotional range has come increasing technical competence, as demonstrated in his self-produced recordings featuring multiple instrumental arrangements in the backing tracks.

1 Discography
2 Secondary Creativity
3 Thing a Week
4 External links

[edit] Discography

Smoking Monkey
Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms
Thing a Week One
Thing a Week Two

Many of Coulton's songs are published on his website [2] as MP3 downloads. Many of them are free. All of his original songs fall under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Coulton also releases other songs under "The Little Gray Book Lectures."

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).

[edit] 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 inspired secondary creativity. Since Coulton uses Creative Commons for licensing, others are free to use his songs in their own non-commercial creative works. As a result, he has attracted a community of loyal fans who actively participate in promoting him by creating supplementary content such as graphics and multimedia productions. A number of music videos have been created using his songs. Machinima such as the ILL Clan's video for "Code Monkey," and Mike "Spiff" Booth's video for Re: Your Brains, and other contributions too numerous to mention, 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 [4] which use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr as a slideshow accompaniment to the song. The Jonathan Coulton Project [5] (also known as JoCoPro), founded by British fan Kerrin Hardy, has created a number of these.

[edit] Thing a Week

"Thing a Week" is the name that Coulton gave to an ambitious creative experiment which ran from 16 September 2005 to 30 September 2006. In this project, Coulton undertook to release 52 original musical pieces in the course of a year, one each week. This target was achieved. 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".