Jonathan Coulton

Len and Nora over at the Jawbone podcast have been big Coulton supporters – always with the airplay and the plugging (Len frequently states that he believes this to be The Year of Coulton). And they’ve recently started making Thing a Week a regular feature of the podcast, with a song from the series and a little phoned in explanation from yours truly. But Len has just upped the ante in the poker game that is our symbiotic relationship by offering to do a weekly visual interpretation of Thing a Week. Below is his first installment, which he seems to have done immediately after the song was posted, and with little difficulty. Or maybe he has access to the same secret audio feed that the New York Times uses to spy on me and steal my ideas.

The creative process is a funny thing. This week I was convinced that I was completely out of songs, that I would never write again, that all the ideas in my head were really just the same lame idea that I’d been using over and over again all along. And I had this piece of something, I knew it was a sad song because I was feeling frustrated and blocked and that’s when the sad ones usually come. I hated it, but I kept smashing it against the wall because I didn’t have any other options and it was Thursday morning already, and I have Paying Subscribers for goodness sake. But then something shook loose and by 3 PM I had a new song. Where did it come from? Why did it take all week to show up? Why can’t I remember how it feels to write when I’m trying to do it and can’t? After 28 of these you’d think I would have found the magic button in my brain that makes a song happen. Still looking.

Anyway, this is an a cappella breakup song (not necessarily about the end of a romance). It didn’t start out a cappella, but there were so many vocals that I decided to take all the instruments away and I liked how it sounded enough to finish it up that way. You don’t hear a lot of really sad a cappella songs, they’re mostly about putting limes in coconuts and zombie jamborees and that sort of thing. At least that’s how we did it at Yale. Ahem. Full disclosure: it is almost certainly a distant relative of Todd Rundgren’s “Pretending to Care.” Also, I realized too late that I had stolen a little chord change/melody line thing from a Jim Boggia song. I hope he either doesn’t mind or doesn’t notice.

When You Go

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I usually avoid this kind of thing, but in this case I can’t help myself. If you live in Washington DC, there are two things that you must do right away. One is to make plans to go see the first installment of the F.W. Thomas Performances, a new monthly literary variety show created and hosted by my friend Adam Mazmanian. Adam is a great writer and a very funny fellow – he read something when John Hodgman, David Rees and I performed there a few months ago, and he absolutely killed. This Monday April 10 at the Warehouse Theater, he may kill again.

The second thing: maybe you’re hungry. Maybe you like delicious food. Maybe you want to eat duck prepared in THREE DIFFERENT WAYS! If so, you should head to David Craig Bethesda and eat there. It is good. I am telling you. Plus, my cousin is the co-owner (and undisputed master of the air guitar), and if you make nice with him he may tell you funny family stories about me. Ask for Johnny Bigpants, and tell him Yale Boy sent you.

…or maybe not. Last week I found an a cappella of Michael Jackson’s Rock with You and spent some time doing a mashup with that and Eye of the Tiger. I was going to post it as the weekly thing, but felt a little weird about it. First of all, the last mashup that was part of thing a week, iTunes told me to take down (because um, it’s illegal). I expect that if I did another mashup they’d say the same thing. That’s part of why I didn’t want to publish it.

But the other thing is that the nature of TAW has changed quite a bit in the last 6 months. For one thing, a lot more people are listening and paying attention. I don’t want to get sued. For another, if I really want this to be a source of income, should I be able to profit by making a mashup that violates copyright? Probably not. What if I post it for free, does that make it less immoral (though no less illegal)? So I was going to refund the subsciption payments, but then what about donations? What about music sales that come from the free advertising I get when people link to my mashup? Where do I draw the line?

I’m just saying, it would be nice if there was an easy way to buy a mashup license the same way it’s easy to buy a cover license. But I do believe that it should be legal to make a non-commercial mashup without permission – The Grey Album is a piece of art that should be allowed to exist. Sure it benefits Danger Mouse, but it also benefits Jay-Z and The Beatles by increasing their cultural relevance.

Oh, the other thing is that I’ve decided my “Rock with the Tiger” mashup is no good.

The elves here in the JoCo workshop have been busy. Couple of new features for you:

Mailing List – yes, I finally got around to it. I’m using the built-in mailing list that comes with my Hostbaby hosting account, which lets me search by city and state and target email those people. I will not spam you all the time, you can subscribe to the blog if you want general JoCo news. I’ll use the email list only for gigs in your area and big announcements (like new CDs or Tonight Show bookings). There’s a link over there in the sidebar – sign up wouldja?

Forums – say what? Aw yeah. Sweet, sweet forums. Link is in the sidebar. I’m using Lussumo Vanilla because it’s free, easy to install, looks good, and comes with a user role called “douchebag” out of the box (so don’t act like a douchebag because I will tag you that way if you do). You’ll have to register to post. I hate to add another registration layer, but I don’t want a bunch of spam in there, and I’m not sure if I can change the functionality even if I wanted to. It would be nice if the blog comment registration, email list and forum registration were all integrated wouldn’t it? Maybe someday…