Jonathan Coulton

As you may have heard through various channels, Artificial Heart is now available for purchase. It’s a very exciting time for all of us! Thank you for all of your positive feedback and excitement about it. I’ve been living alone with it so long that I had begun to really go crazy not being able to share it with you all. Now that we can all listen to it, I feel complete again.

Many of you have been asking questions, and it seems that some of these questions have been asked more frequently than others. I’m going to take a look at these “QAFs” (Questions that are Asked Frequently) in the paragraphs to follow, and hopefully answer a few of them for you.

Here is the general plan: the album is for sale in its entirety right now through my website as a digital download in a format of your choosing. There are also some special bundles containing various physical objects. I am working on putting it in iTunes and all sorts of other digital stores even as we speak. I don’t have an ETA except to say that it will happen as soon as it is physically possible. Top men are working on it. Top. Men. I don’t have a specific list of the digital stores, but chances are the answer to your question that starts “Will it be available in [SOME ONLINE STORE]…” would be “Yes,” were you to ask it of me.

The bundles will be available for a limited time (more on this in a second). I wanted to do these initial offerings because: 1) I was tired of waiting for the gears to turn on the non direct sales side, let’s do this thing already! 2) I liked the idea of trying to cover the expenses of making this thing early on, so that I could maybe begin to relax – kind of a backwards Kickstarter strategy, and 3) I think it’s fun and exciting to have a special, celebratory moment at the beginning of this album’s life. In particular the level four participation and the various plans I have for it have become a fun creative play space for me. This is not a concept album per se, but it’s got some strong thematic undercurrents that are fun to mess with, hence the logo, the motto, the symbols, the evaluation questions, and other things yet to be revealed.

I do not always want to be in the business of direct physical sales, so I’m going to sell these things for a while and then stop. The CD and the Artificial Heart Shirt will be available for purchase after that, but these specific bundles, the signed CD, and all the other stuff that comes with Level Four will only be around for a little while – let’s say through the end of September, or while supplies last. Judging from the trend so far, I will make 1,000 of these and that will be all.

I actually had a meeting last week with the people who are making and assembling all the Level Four packages, and let’s just say we got plans – cool stuff is going to be in there, and it’s going to look great and satisfy you in that fuzzy, collector’s item kind of way.

Thank you all for the overwhelming support you have shown me over the years, even when I was not writing anything at all, but especially now as I publish what is really my first substantial new work since Thing a Week (eep). I hope you are enjoying listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.

There’s a long boring story about the many things going on behind the scenes as I move through the strange netherworld between album completion and album release. In one chapter of that story, I was on Cape Cod with my family, enjoying the beach and a lot of lobster rolls just prior to when everything started really churning. At that point, the plan was to release Good Morning Tucson as the first track shortly after my return to NYC. I thought it would be fun to have a video for it, but of course there I was on vacation with no video directors in sight. What I did have was a couple of iPhones, some duct tape, a kite, a rocket, an RC airplane, two children, a wife, a giant inflatable sphere, and a 2004 Volkswagen Jetta. Which was close enough, I figured. It helped that I had a great editor I could send the footage to – his name is Chris Dillon and you will no doubt recognized his work from my concert DVD, “Best. Concert. Ever.”, which he also edited.

You can take this as evidence of my efficiency and ability to multitask, or you can take it as an example of the many ways in which I often fail to draw a clear line between work and not-work. Mostly you can take it as a demonstration of what a FANTASTIC skim boarding technique I have, and how I need to lose about 15 pounds and maybe get a spray tan.

The song Good Morning Tucson is obviously not about going to the beach. At least, it didn’t used to be!

You can download this slightly higher quality, pre-YouTube-Compression version if you like, and well looky here, there’s the song itself, free to all. Those links will be live for a couple of weeks at which point they are timed to expire so that robots crawling the web of the future do not destroy my bandwidth. Get em while they’re hot.

Yes indeed, I’m coming to Dragon*Con for the first time ever this year and I’m excited and scared (of dragons)! I don’t know what to expect really, so I’m playing a lot of stuff by ear. But here’s my schedule as far as I can tell.

Friday 9/2
1 PM – Geek a Week panel with Len Peralta at the Hyatt, Regency VI – VII

2:30 PM – Paul and Storm Talk About Some Stuff for Five to Ten Minutes (On Average) – LIVE podcast at the Hilton, Room 204

8:30 PM – The Artificial Heart Album Release Show, off campus at the Variety Playhouse. I’ll be playing old stuff and new stuff, both acoustic and with the band, and I’ll have the new CD and new Artificial Heart shirts available for purchase. Paul and Storm will open. This is not an official Dragon*Con event, so you’ll need to buy tickets to attend.

Saturday 9/3
During the dayish – I’ll have a merch booth set up in the band area at the Marriott, and I hope to take your money there (in exchange for music and TShirts). I don’t have a good sense for how the merch thing works at Dragon*Con, so this is one of the things I’m going to figure out on the fly. Follow @jonathancoulton on Twitter and I’ll send updates when I know more about specific times.

8:30 PM – Gonzoroo, an evening of musical delights featuring me, Paul and Storm, and lots of other stuff, hosted by megastar Ken Plume. I’ll be acoustic only at this show, and I’ll be selling STILL MORE STUFF after the show. All this happens at the Marriott, Atrium Ballroom.

Sunday 9/4
During the dayish – More action at the merch booth! Probably!

8:30 PM – Gonzo Quiz Show III: Beyond Thunderquiz, a celebrity quiz show panel show game show SHOW hosted by Ken Plume and Widgett Walls. Expect the unexpected.

Monday 9/5
Who knows! I’m going to be pretty tired and covered in dragon juice by then, hopefully will be able to take some time and actually SEE some things. Or I might be at the merch booth. Or I might be at the bottom of a Scorpion Bowl at Trader Vic’s. Watch Twitter for updates.

Really excited to finally be able to check this crazy thing out. I hope to see you there!

We are inching closer to the point when you will all be able to actually HEAR this new record I’ve been talking about forever. In fact, here is a track for you to listen to right now. It’s called “Nemeses” and the lead vocal is sung by none other than JoCo Cruise Crazy favorite (he is also famous for other things) John Roderick.

I hope you like it, because it’s good, and so if you don’t like it then that means you have terrible taste.