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 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 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.^[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, ukulele, or glockenspiel.

Contents

Discography

Secondary creativity

Thing a Week

References

External links

Discography

''For Jonathan Coulton's full discography, including tracklistings, see 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]

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.^[5] These images are available in a book entitled ''Visual Thing A Week: Art Inspired By the Music of Jonathan Coulton.''^[6]
Jonathan Coulton's "A Talk With George" was the winner of the Plimpton Project's song contest.

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 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".^[7]

References

1. "Witty Tunes Are Jonathan Coulton's 'Thing'" (accessed 2007-05-07) on NPR's "All Things Considered''
2. Daily Show: Hodgman - Essay Contest
3. Code Monkey Like Fritos
4. Prinny Please
5. [1]
6. [2]
7. Quick Stop Interview: Jonathan Coulton

External links

★ Jonathan Coulton's Website

★ Request a Jonathan Coulton concert at Eventful

★ Audio Interview with Jonathan Coulton on Tech Talk for Families Podcast discussing his career and family

★ Jonathan Coulton on creativity and the creative process, an interview with about-creativity.com April 19, 2007

★ Jonathan Coulton was musical guest on 7/22/2007's ''Operation BSU,'' a call-in interactive podcast talk show. NSFW.