Jonathan Coulton

Poor Scarface has been inundated with questions about how I managed to set it up so that people can add themselves to my mailing list by sending a text message. It was actually pretty easy to do once I found the right site – the trick now is me remembering to stop my set and tell the audience to do it. I remembered in Ann Arbor, but I think probably I forgot in the last couple of shows before that, because I am a big fat dummy.

The trick: I signed up for a free account at Textmarks.com, which lets you choose a unique keyword (I chose JoCo, for obvious reasons). You can then set it up so that when someone texts a message to the Textmarks number (41411) that starts with your keyword, stuff happens. In my case, I set it up so that Textmarks parses the message, grabbing everything after the JoCo, which I assume is the email address. It then composes and posts to my “add this email to my mailing list” URL, passing that text as a parameter. The URL happens to be from the email list tools that are built into Hostbaby (my web host), but it would be pretty easy to do just about anything you want once you get the email into a page on your site – database access or some other further processing. Or if you’ve got some other mailing list management solution, as long as you can add with a URL you can use this method.

There is my secret. Go forth and SPAM.

Sitting here at the gate waiting to board, if the weather treats me nice I’ll be back in NY in just a few hours. It was another great bunch of shows here in the Midwest, though I have made a mental note to make sure that the next time I come back here it should probably be in the time of year when there are NOT ice storms. Thanks to everyone who braved the black ice in Madison, thanks to the weather gods who brought the snow to St. Paul the night before our show, and Chicago, well, just thanks. If, in fact, you exist.

As you may know I’ve been assembling set lists from Twitter requests, and I have to say the results have been really interesting. There are requests for songs I would never dare to force on an audience, songs I don’t play well, songs that haven’t seen the light of day in years. It feels nice to be taking some risks again, even when I fall on my face. The most surprising thing to me is how mellow and sad the requests seem to trend – I don’t think there’s been a single show where someone hasn’t asked for Famous Blue Raincoat. I usually try to include as much up tempo funny stuff as I can, but I do love a sad song, and it’s nice to have permission to play a few of them. You asked for it!

Also, my life has become a parade of famous person cameos – Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett and Neil Gaiman were all at the St. Paul show (on stage with us for goodness sake), and last night we had sushi with Adam Savage. It’s like a weird dream. I am a big fan of all of these people, so it’s bizarre and wonderful to get to hang out with them and their large, white, affable dogs.

And on top of it all, audiences keep showing up and being nice to me. You rule, audience. Thanks everyone for another great trip.