I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. There are many comments and questions out there already with more to come, and rather than have a bunch of separate discussions on a bunch of different social media platforms, I thought I would put some of my thoughts here.

First of all, I was being sarcastic. I did not see an uptick in sales because one piracy site got shut down, nor do I expect to.

Second, this was a tweet, so it was <=140 characters of ha ha, and not designed to be a thorough discussion of all the issues. I recognize these things are complicated.

Obviously none of us knows the complete truth, but I'm guessing that the people who ran MegaUpload were knowingly profiting from the unauthorized download of other people's intellectual property (including mine). Probably they were making a lot of money that way. That's certainly illegal, and it doesn't exactly give them the moral high ground either. In fact, it's kind of a dick move. Essentially, they did bad things and they got in trouble for it. Here are the issues that, for me, make this complicated.

Along with all the illegal stuff happening on MegaUpload was some amount of completely legal stuff. People used MegaUpload to send large files around. Some number of those files were personal files owned by the people sending them. I have no idea what the ratio was, and probably it would be impossible to figure that out with any certainty, but let's stipulate that it was a very large percentage of illegal activity, and only a very tiny percentage of the users were there for anything other than downloading content that they didn't buy. Still, today that tiny percentage had something taken away from them, without warning, maybe just a service they liked using, but maybe a piece of digital media that belonged to them - if they uploaded something and didn't keep a copy, that thing is now gone. Them's the breaks I guess, but in evaluating whether this shutdown was a net positive for us humans, you have to take that into account.

Even some of the illegal usage was likely the kind of activity that approaches what I consider to be victimless piracy: people downloading stuff they already bought but lost, people downloading stuff they missed on TV and couldn't find on Netflix or iTunes, people downloading stuff they didn't like and regretted watching or hearing and never would have bought anyway, people downloading a Jonathan Coulton album (oh let's say, Artificial Heart, the new Jonathan Coulton album, which is an awesome Jonathan Coulton album called Artificial Heart) and loving it so much that in a year they decide to buy a ticket to a Jonathan Coulton show and walk up to the merch table and hand me $20. I know not everyone will think all of those things are victimless crimes, and even I can admit that some of them maybe kinda sorta have victims, but my point is that you can’t easily say that every illegal download is a lost sale, because it’s a lot more complicated than that. So when you evaluate the “damage” that a site like MegaUpload is causing, you have to think about these things too. The grand jury indictment against them says they’ve caused $500 million in damages to copyright owners. Given the complexity of actual usage on a site like MegaUpload, how can they possibly know that?

The real question in my mind these days, and what I was trying to get at with my little tweet, is: how much does piracy really hurt content creators (specifically, me)? Professional smart person Tim O’Reilly posted something that made me think about this question again in regards to SOPA/PIPA. He points out that any proponent of SOPA/PIPA starts with the assumption that all this piracy is causing great harm to lots of people and companies. Here’s his pull quote, taken from a recent statement about SOPA issued by the White House:

Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.

Is it really as dire as all that? It’s an emergency is it? Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.

So if you can stand me sounding a little crazy, listen: where is the proof that piracy causes economic harm to anyone? Looking at the music business, yes profits have gone down ever since Napster, but has anyone effectively demonstrated the causal link between that and piracy? There are many alternate theories (people buying songs and not whole albums, music sucking more, niches and indie acts becoming more viable, etc.). The Swiss government did a study and determined that unauthorized downloading (which 1/3 of their citizens do) does not create any loss in revenue for the entertainment industry. I remember but am now too lazy to find links to other studies that say the same thing. I can’t think of any study I’ve seen that demonstrates the opposite. If there is one, please point me to it. So I have a lot of trouble with the idea that the federal government is directing resources toward an ultimately ineffective game of piracy whack-a-mole (with some unknown amount of collateral damage to law-abiding citizens), when we are not even sure that piracy is a problem.

And if you can stand me sounding even crazier, here is this: making money from art is not a human right. It so happens that technological and societal blahbity bloos have conspired to create a situation where selling songs about monkeys and robots is a viable business, but for most of human history people have NOT paid for art. I don’t want this to happen again, and I would be very sad if this came to pass, but it’s not up to me to decide. We are constantly demonstrating through our actions what we believe to be the norms for acquiring and consuming content. Right now a lot of us think that it’s OK to download stuff through illegal sites under certain circumstances, and a lot of us think it’s totally fine to use those things to make videos and put them on YouTube even though YouTube profits from it. That’s not ME saying that, that’s US saying that – we’re a nation of pirates and infringers. Based on our behavior, you would not be wrong to deduce that some of us think funny videos on YouTube are more important than honoring intellectual property rights. This kind of thing has happened before. Entire industries rise and fall as the world changes and our priorities shift. Sorry.

I believe in copyright. I benefit from it. I don’t want it to go away. I love that we have laws and people to enforce them. But if I had to give up one thing, if I had to choose between copyright and the wild west, semi-lawless, innovation-fest that is the internet? I’ll take the internet every time.

Now you may comment. I’m going to watch this thread and respond when I can, and we’re going to have a nice discussion. We’re not going to have fights and call each other names, and if you’re a jerk, I’m going to delete the jerky things you say. (And if you infringe on my copyright I’m going to send federal agents to your home and throw your computers IN THE GARBAGE.)

Tickets to the tapings are free, so all you need is an available evening and the ability to get your body to where it’s happening. The next one is at the Bell House in Brooklyn on January 23rd. I’ll be on tour or on a cruise ship for much of February, so I won’t be in the February 6th and 13th shows, but I will be a part of all the rest.

Because I sense it will become a FAQ, I will answer it now: no, I won’t be playing a TON of Jonathan Coulton songs. This is not a Jonathan Coulton show, so you shouldn’t expect a 12 minute Code Monkey jam. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t come, because you should – there will be puzzles, and victories, and defeats, and witty banter, and for goodness sake it’s absolutely free. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!?!?

Tickets here!

Artificial Heart

Artificial Heart special edition packages are almost all the way out the door. Levels 2 and 3 have shipped (3 went out just before Christmas), and Level 4 packages are being assembled RIGHT NOW and the plan is for them to hit the mail this week. The planet will breathe a little easier once that happens. I thank all of you for your patience, even the people who never ordered anything from me.

In general I’m really pleased with how the album has been received. Ridiculous Billboard charting incident aside, it seems to have found its way to a lot of people who like it, which makes me happy. All those videos I mentioned last time have now been released, so if you missed any of them, you can find them here. I think my favorite has to be Je Suis Rick Springfield, which features the Baldwin Fun Machine, a nice looking suit, and some even nicer looking bare feet.

The Cruise

JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 is coming up fast: February 19th-26th. We’ve sold through most of our allotment of cabins, so the booking website looks barren and sad, but there may still be cabins on board that we can snag if anyone is still interested in booking. Just get in touch with us at booking@jococruisecrazy.com and let us know what you’re looking for, and we’ll see what we can do. In case you haven’t heard on the Twitters, last minute additions to the talent line-up include John Flansburgh (who will be DJing a couple of dance parties), Molly Lewis, Joseph Scrimshaw, and Chris Collingwood from Fountains of Wayne. You should come! There is still time, but not much!

The official JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 T-shirt is now available at Topatoco for a limited time only, until January 13th. Order now and you’ll have the shirt in time for the cruise (or whatever sad, fake cruise you’re planning to have instead). While it’s possible we may have some EXTREMELY limited quantities on board, this is really the only sure way to make sure that you get one in the size you want, so order now or risk heartbreak forever.

Speaking of shirts, did you all see this fantastic new JoCo Has Some Problems shirt? Because it truly is my new favorite thing. I am fighting zombies!

The Touring

I’m out with The Might Be Giants again in February for the final leg of their Join Us tour. We start in California and head east until we get home, so it’s a big one. All these shows are with the band, and pretty short (but completely kickass) sets because I’m the opening act. Details on the Shows page as always, but here are the dates:

The Rio Theater – Santa Cruz, CA
January 27th 8pm
Tickets

Royce Hall – Los Angeles, CA
January 28th 8pm
Tickets

Marquee Theater – Tempe, AZ
January 29th 6:30pm
Tickets

Rialto Theatre – Tucson, AZ
January 30th 8pm
Tickets

Cain’s Ballroom – Tulsa, OK
February 1st 8pm
Tickets

Granada Theater – Dallas, TX
February 2nd 8pm
Tickets

La Zona Rosa – Austin, TX
February 3rd 9pm
Tickets

Tipitina’s (Uptown) – New Orleans, LA
February 4th 10pm
Tickets

The Ritz Ybor – Tampa, FL
February 7th 8pm
Tickets

Hard Rock Live – Orlando, FL
February 8th 8pm
Tickets

Ponte Vedra Concert Hall – Ponte Vedra Beach, FL
February 9th 8pm
Tickets

Variety Playhouse – Atlanta, GA
February 10th 8:30pm
Tickets

Variety Playhouse – Atlanta, GA
February 11th 8:30pm
Tickets

Track 29 – Chattanooga, TN
February 12th 8pm
Tickets

McGlohon Theater at Spirit Square – Charlotte, NC
February 14th 7:30pm
Tickets

Lincoln Theater – Raleigh, NC
February 15th 8pm
Tickets

Jefferson Theater – Charlottesville, VA
February 16th 8pm
Tickets

Calvin Theater – Northampton, MA
March 8th 8pm
Tickets

Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel – Providence, RI
March 9th 8pm
Tickets

Terminal 5 – New York, NY
March 10th 7pm
Tickets

The Future

Between now and the cruise I’ll be getting ready for the cruise. Between the cruise and the future, who knows. I’ve been invited to be a part of this new NPR puzzle quiz show called Ask Me Another (fb page) that seems like it’s going to be pretty fun, and we’ll be recording a few of those in front of live audiences in NYC and DC over the next few months. I’ll let you know more about that when I have more details. I’m working on putting together a tour for late spring/early summer where I headline again, and play full size sets the way I used to. Which leaves some time in the early Spring for me to lie about and look at pretty flowers and things. Maybe I will write some songs.

I hope your new year is already better than your old one, especially if your old one was pretty great.

This is to let you know that we’re getting down to our last few reserved cabins. We’ve been shuffling things around to keep as wide a distribution of cabin types as possible, but the ship itself is getting pretty full, and many stateroom categories are completely sold out. After December 6th we’re going to have to stop shuffling and begin to either sell through or give back all our rooms. So if you’ve been on the fence about going, or if you have friends who are dillying and dallying, now is a good time to pull the trigger. Not to say that nobody can book after December 6th, just that we’ll have a lot less flexibility than we do now.

This is also the time when I personally stop worrying about all the things I need to do to make the cruise happen and start to just look forward to it in a big way. We’ve got the last minute addition of John Flansburgh (who will be DJing a couple of dance parties for us), plus the already superbad array of fantastic performers and fun people. For the record, the complete list includes me, Paul and Storm, John Hodgman, Wil Wheaton, Vi Hart, John Roderick, MC Frontalot, Marian Call, David Rees, Paul F. Tompkins, and DJ John Flansburgh. We will have fruity cocktails together. We will all get horribly sunburned. We will wear fake mustaches. We will order club sandwiches delivered to our staterooms at 2 in the morning and it will cost us nothing.

THERE WILL BE BAKED ALASKA.

So if you like those things and don’t want to make Jimmy Whales cry (because everyone knows, whales and sea creatures in general LOVE cruise ships), then book now.

I’ve described this before, but since I’m sure people will ask, I’m singing into an audio plugin called The Mouth. I don’t know specifically what this particular setting is doing to my vocal, but it sounds to me like it’s interpreting the frequency content of the input and mapping that to a spread across several different octaves of the same note. So it creates an accompanying voice in multiple octaves of a single note. I control what that note is via midi, in this case using my monome (using it in the most boring way possible, to play midi notes, which is SHAMEFUL, but it sure does have pretty lights).

The red cowboy shirt does not affect the audio in any way.

NUMBER ONE
Today, November 8th, is the official release date for the Artificial Heart CD. It should be available now at Amazon and at other CD-buying places (I actually don’t know where those places are – “stores” maybe?). I have noticed that the title is misspelled on Amazon, which is GREAT. They’re fixing it.

NUMBER TWO
You brave and generous souls who pre-ordered the signed CD (Level Two Participants) should receive your CDs very soon, as in, this week (unless you’re in a far away country in which case it might take a bit longer). The warehouse monkeys tell me that they started sending them out yesterday. My hand is tired from signing them, but my heart is full of your love. Thank you.

Level Three will go out as soon as the shirts are done, looking like a couple weeks. Level Four will go out as soon as everything is done, still looking like early December. Thank you all for your patience.

NUMBER THREE
One of the things that has been keeping me so busy is that I have been making music videos. This isn’t like me at all – I couldn’t even remember how to log into my YouTube channel. Flansburgh and I made a bunch of them at once, and I think they all came out pretty great. Today I posted one for Nemeses that features John Roderick singing next to me on an iPhone:

And also one for Still Alive, the new version on Artificial Heart that’s sung by the delightful Sara Quin:

Yesterday Hodgman posted one of the two of us doing our classic ukulele/guitar duet of Tonight You Belong to Me (not on the album, but you know, what the hey):

And there are plenty more coming. With the exception of Still Alive, which was done months ago when we were recording the album, all these videos are also brand new live recordings of the songs, simple arrangements done as we were shooting. So eventually you’ll see videos of ALL NEW LIVE versions of Today with Your Wife, Sticking It to Myself, Nobody Loves You Like Me, Down Today, and Je Suis Rick Springfield.

NUMBER FOUR
As sad as I am to not be traveling with my friend John Hodgman on his book tour, I’m delighted to be out on the road again with They Might Be Giants. We’re west coasting it now, Vancouver tonight, Seattle, Portland, you know the rest. Come on out and see us – check my schedule for details.

NUMBER FIVE
And by the way, Hodgman’s new book is absolutely fantastic and you should all buy it and read it. I don’t know anything about an audio book version, though I suspect and hope that he’ll do one and invite me to participate. If you get the chance you should really go out and see one of his readings – and calling them readings fails to fully prepare you for the fact that they are entertainment spectaculars. Honestly, he’s at the top of his game these days, and probably the descent into booze and pills is just around the corner. So don’t miss it.

NUMBER SIX
Rock Band versions of a few select songs from Artificial Heart are coming.

NUMBER SEVEN
The cruise is still happening, in spite of all the other things that would satisfy any normal human as Enough Things Happening Already. It’s going to be great. If you’re still on the fence about joining us, you should know that the ship is filling up fast, and we’re running out of our allotment of rooms. So don’t sit on the fence for too long, or you will fall into the ocean!

I think that’s all. Is that everything?

Attention citizens of planet Earth:

I’m writing to let you know that today is the last chance to purchase one of the Artificial Heart bundles. At midnight tonight I’ll be closing sales for good, so I can get to the business of actually sending everything out. Inevitably there will be someone who doesn’t hear about this in time and feels sad that they missed it, but that is the way of things. After sales are closed, the album will be available for purchase in digital form through my regular store and it is in fact already available at iTunes, Amazon, Rdio, etc. (Spotify coming soon I hear – they have a backlog). If you or someone you know needs to have one of these once in a lifetime awesome things, here is the place to make that happen:

bit.ly/pdYyZE

In other news, I want to thank everyone who came out to see me open for They Might Be Giants in September on the first leg of their Join Us tour. What a blast! Big, excitable crowds, loud rock music, every show a delight. I will be back for more in November (see list of shows below).

To answer a couple FAQs about my touring schedule:
I don’t know yet about the They Might Be Giants shows that I am not listed on as the opener. This includes the Tulsa makeup show, the January/February leg, and a bunch of other odds and ends. You should consult my site and the TMBG site to figure out if I’m opening for any given show. And chances are if those sites say I’m not opening, that means either I’m not opening or I don’t know yet – believe me, I am not keeping these things secret. The only sure things right now are on the list below. And yes, at some point I will do my own shows again, with the standard eight hour set list that you have all become used to.

To answer a couple FAQs about the bundles:
Level 2 is easy enough to ship out since it’s just a signed CD, so that will happen first. I’m hoping to get those out to everyone in the next couple of weeks. I had to wait until orders were mostly done so I’d have some idea of shirt quantities, so Level 3 is going to take a little longer while I wait for them to get made – more news soon. Level 4 is still up in the air, it’s likely that they won’t ship until end of November at the earliest – yes, it’s killing me too. But there’s at least one item in there that I haven’t told you about that has a super long lead time, but I think is going to be pretty cool to have. I have plans to do fun things will all you Level 4 folks and your nemeses while we wait, so I’m hopeful that you will feel like you’re getting your money’s worth even before you get the box itself. If ever you are too annoyed by all this and you just want your damned money back, just let me know.

Thank you to everyone who has purchased and/or said nice things about Artificial Heart. I hear that today it’s on the iTunes “Rock on the Rise” list, which is kind of exciting. It’s also getting airplay on a few actual radio stations, also exciting. I have already purchased a few private jets in anticipation of it going quadruple platinum. Think ahead, that’s my motto!

Here’s the next round of touring. Let’s learn those new songs, people!

Nov 4 Salt Lake City, UT – The Depot

bit.ly/join-us-slc

Nov 5 Boise, ID – Knitting Factory

ticketf.ly/join-us-boise

Nov 6 Spokane, WA – Knitting Factory

ticketf.ly/join-us-spokane

Nov 8 Vancouver, BC – Venue

bit.ly/join-us-vancouverbc

Nov 9 Seattle, WA – Showbox SoDo

bit.ly/join-us-seattle

Nov 10 Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom

bit.ly/join-us-portland

Nov 11 Arcata, CA – Van Duzer Theatre

bit.ly/join-us-arcata

Nov 12 San Francisco, CA – Fillmore

bit.ly/join-us-san-fran12th

Nov 13 San Francisco, CA – Fillmore

bit.ly/join-us-san-fran13th

Nov 16 Anaheim, CA – House of Blues

bit.ly/join-us-anaheim

Nov 17 San Diego, CA – Belly Up

bit.ly/join-us-san-diego

Talk to you soonish,

-j

Thing a Week 52: We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions

Unbelievably, we are here. Thanks to all of you who sent in hand claps – every one of them is in there. It was very charming how almost all of you apologized for the quality of the recording, and suggested that I just throw it away and forget about it if it was unusable. I have taught you well – always, ALWAYS doubt yourself.

I’m sad and relieved that it’s the end. It’s been a really amazing trip from 1 to 52, and I can’t thank all of you enough for the many different kinds of support you’ve offered me over this last year. If you bought a CD, if you bought a song, if you sent a donation, if you drew a picture, if you made a video, if you stole a song and passed it along to a friend, if you babysat while I recorded vocals, even if you just wrote me to tell me you like the music, you are one of the reasons that this lasted a whole year. The difference between my life then and my life now is enormous, and it’s all because of you. And while the standard rich and famous contract continues to elude me, in the ways that really matter I am filthy, stinking rich.

Thank you.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: The audacity! The nice thing about covering a song like this is that it takes the pressure off - you can always blame your failure to excel on the original being so iconic and irreplaceable. Though I think we did pretty well all things considered. Getting the hand claps from everyone felt absolutely correct, and the scope of the song is huge and epic, which seemed important. Once I’d hit on this as the final song, I couldn’t think of anything that fit better.

I couldn’t get the boom claps right, so I got them wrong in a different way. There are plenty of mix and arrangement problems I can hear, but boy was I tired of solving those! I love the way it veers into the instrumental section at the end of We Will Rock You with the slide guitar and the sweeping vocals. The slow picky arrangement of We Are the Champions works pretty well I think, and the understated nature of it gives the whole thing a fresh coat of poignant. Arranging it as a sad song is somewhat predictable given my tendencies, but still appropriate. It’s always sounded to me like a slightly depressing, “non-victory” victory song. “No time for losers cuz we are the champions of the world” - sounds a lot like a Jonathan Coulton character to me. Pathetic but proud, no self-knowledge, tragically sure of himself. Possibly a monkey or a robot (technically, you can’t tell if it is a monkey or robot or not, I’m just saying).

Just like in Thing a Week five years ago, here I am at the end and I’ve already said a tearful goodbye last week. What a relief! I’m not sure what to say, except thank you again and again and again. There was no reason at all to suspect that this ridiculous plan was going to work. The only reason it did was because of the various kinds of support I got from complete strangers all over the web and all over the world. I am grateful, always.

It’s a strange time for musicians and the business that lives around them. It’s a simple truth that For Sale competes with Free in the digital realm. That’s just the way it is. We don’t get to decide if it’s good for us or not, because we’ve already demonstrated that this is the way we want things to work. So now we have to figure out what to do.

In my experience, For Sale wins often enough that it doesn’t matter what’s happening on the Free side. This may not be true for everyone. You could argue that people only pay for things because the iTunes store came along and made it slightly easier to buy than to steal. You could suggest that the only reason it works for me is because I write funny songs about monkeys and robots. You could predict that in ten years, the downward trend of the value of a song in mp3 form will lead us to a place where music is free. I might grant you all of those things, but I still think we’re going to be fine. Music isn’t going away - it was here long before we figured out a way to make money from it, and it will be here at least until the day we all upload our brains into the giant universe-shaped computer and disappear. The music business is an accident, a side-effect, an unintended consequence; music comes from humans.

I’m immensely proud of Thing a Week, partially because of what I accomplished, but more because of what WE accomplished. My plan, if you can call it that, was to concede victory to Free at the start. You guys pay me anyway, almost as if you “like music” and “want to support musicians.” Dummies.

Thank you for everything.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

I’m closing sales on all levels this Wednesday at midnight. At the same time I’ll be moving Artificial Heart to the standard store page here on my site. I don’t want any sad people to find out about these fantastic bundle purchase opportunities only after they’re gone, so if there’s anyone you know who should purchase these things, let them know that time is running out. Inevitably, and in spite of your best efforts, someone will tweet at 12:01 AM Thursday morning “OMG! I missed out! I wish I had known!” It’s just how these things go.

The album should now be available in most digital online stores, though I’m getting reports that the title is misspelled in a few places. Which is fantastic news! Gah! If you can’t find it in your favorite digital music store, you may want to search for Jonathan Coulton and then click on the album “Artifical Heart” [sic]. Jeepers creepers people.

For those of you who have purchased a bundle and have questions about shirt sizes, address changes, upgrades and the like, in theory Scarface should have gotten back to you via email. If not, let us know. We’re planning on giving everyone a chance to confirm shipping address and shirt sizes before we mail these things out. I’m choosing a shirt brand this coming week (it’s likely to be similar to American Apparel in fit and quality) and will let everyone know what that is and post sizing charts before asking you to reconfirm your size choices. You’ll be allowed to choose different sizes for different shirts. I don’t want any unhappy customers.

The Level Four box is going to be awesome. It will contain some surprise items. It will be a classy collectors edition type situation and you will be the envy of all your friends if you have one. I don’t have a timeline yet, but will let you know as soon as I have a likely ship date. In the meantime, you Level Four folks will soon have access to other fun stuff that is not in the box. We will entertain ourselves while we wait.

Speaking of which, has anyone figured out what all the symbols mean yet? Because I have.

Thing a Week 51: Summer’s Over

Isn’t it though? Here’s the thing – this is song #51, and the next one is #52 and I’m freaking out. It was very hard to write this one. You can imagine how much pressure I’m feeling at this point to wrap the whole thing up with a couple of really kick-ass songs about monkeys and robots, really blow everybody’s mind. As a result, I can’t think of anything really interesting to say about monkeys or robots. So this one’s just about somebody leaving somebody else at the end of the summer (hint: no it’s not, it’s about the end of Thing a Week).

It was especially hard because I knew something you didn’t, which is that this is the last song I’ll write for Thing a Week. Next week is going to be a cover. Why yes, it is a cop out. But really, I can’t imagine writing something that’s as appropriate as this cover song will be – you’ll see. It just feels right to me.

Speaking of which, I need a little something from you folks to make it happen. If you have the capability to record decently (no built-in laptop microphones please), I would like you to record a single hand clap and email it to me. Your best hand clap please, mp3 is fine as long as it’s a pretty decent bitrate. By doing so you agree to let me use it for whatever I want from now until the end of time without getting any sort of credit for it, ever. But you’ll be on a CD.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Of all the songs that I can’t remember writing, this one feels the most like it was implanted in my history by space aliens. No idea. I was playing it close to the vest in the blog, keeping it light, but there was definitely some heavy emotional stuff going on about the approaching end of Thing a Week.

I’ve always had trouble with transitions. I get obsessed with the borders between things - everything that came before this moment was X, everything after will be Y. I can’t help but try to unpack that moment, savor it, hate it. Birthdays, graduations, moving day, they’re all terrible. All that stuff functioned as a multiplier for the standard weekly performance anxiety, which had been growing larger all year anyway. It was overwhelming. So I tricked me, and I made this one the last one. I basically left without saying goodbye (though technically I do say goodbye quite a few times in this song).

I have a vague memory of still having large gaps in the lyrics during the recording process, so I’m betting that this song really didn’t get started until Thursday or Friday. There are a couple of clunker lines in there, and sitting here with all this distance, they seem incredibly easy to fix. Or maybe I just write differently now. Anyway, I forgive myself for the melodrama with all the flowers dying and the cold wind, because I absolutely love the kicker lines at the ends of the verses. And the middle section with the lonely accordion and the a cappella singing group vocals sounds positively cinematic to me. All in all, it feels pleasantly unfamiliar enough to convince me that during this period, I was really WRITING in a way I never had before.

That bit about goodbyes moving in circles hits me hard here in this hotel room in wherever-I-am. Five years ago I was finishing Thing a Week, feeling proud and hopeful about the possibilities, but coming up on a scary stretch of unknown territory - what now? Hodgman’s first book was out and I was about to accompany him on his big book tour. I was just starting to do my own shows in other cities. I was gearing up to release all the Thing a Week songs as albums. I was ready to admit that this was my job. It was the end of TAW but the beginning of everything else, very much a time of LAUNCHING things. None of which was at all obvious to me at the time.

And now here I am in this hotel room in wherever-I-am, on tour with They Might Be Giants. They’ve got a new album out, I’ve got a new album out, I’ve got this new band, all these new songs about grownup things. Hodgman has another new book coming out and is about to start touring. So here we are again, five years later, and I’m truly grateful and amazed, but still facing the same scary stretch of unknown territory. What now?

I like to play the game where I imagine going back to tell five-years-ago me what was about to happen to him. There’s no way he would believe it. And I think that’s what really gets me about these transitions, the idea that the end of this thing you know is really just the beginning of this thing you haven’t met yet. It seems like there should be a way to see that new thing, to figure it out ahead of time instead of blindly stumbling across it. Of course you can’t - that’s precisely the difference between the future and the past. And here we all are, eternally stuck in the present, where all you can do is close your eyes, put your head down, and go.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 50: Pull the String

This appears to be about a famous person with a terrible secret. It’s not about anyone in particular as far as I know. Maybe it’s about you – Tom Cruise! Or you – John Hodgman! It kind of reminds me of Big Bad World One, mostly because of the A/E ambiguity in the verse. Believe it or not, that acoustic riff in the verse is an idea that’s been floating around in my head since I was about 17 – it’s a relief to finally get that one out the door. Who’s next!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: I am listening now to this song for the first time in five years - I’ve never played this one live, haven’t really thought about it since the day I uploaded it. Love that E over A thing. I am realizing now it reminds me of the piano lick between verse couplets in the Donald Fagen song “New Frontier” (oops, sorry Donald). Mix needs a lot of help, I seem to have layered myself into muddy territory during the pre choruses. Whoa, right, forgot about this bridge - what the? Abrupt, chopped off ending for extra drama, got it.

OK. Some good and bad here. On the plus side, I think most of the music is coming from an original place, or at least I don’t hear the endless parade of standard JoCo tricks I usually resort to when I’m out of ideas. Maybe that’s just because it’s been so long since I’ve heard this song that I don’t even remember how to play it right now, but the chord changes sound kind of fresh but catchy, which is the whole point of a pop song. I like the textural change-ups a lot, the way it gets big and small and loud and quiet. I was ashamed of the bridge the first time I heard it again, but listening a second time I think it’s kind of nice - it’s all new territory within the song, and I think the buildup thing works pretty well with the noisy guitars and everything. All of that stuff sounds to me like at least I was still inventing things at this point. Guitars are not awful. Lead vocal performance actually has a nice vibe to it, as if I cared about what I was singing, which is not always something I am able to capture when I’m singing into a microphone.

The biggest problem for me is the lyrics. I fell into the classic trap where the song is just about one thing and every line is just another way to describe that thing in a not very interesting way. Those kinds of songs can certainly work, but this one centers on a pretty nonspecific and low stakes idea, and it simply doesn’t generate much heat. Also, there are a bunch of phrases in there that sound a little pat to me: “they all want in,” “underneath your skin,” “call your lawyer.” It sounds like a Glen Frey song from 1984, where you’re “in the night” and this or that thing is “dangerous” because something is happening “in your heart” or maybe “on the streets of this city.” Oy.

I’ve written a lot of songs like this in my life, ones that should be good but are not because they lack some essential unnameable thing. This is the one you leave off the album, or you put aside for a while and then try re-writing later once you have starved it of enough attention that it’s ready to play ball. With more time I might have solved the problem by finding something personal to write about - not me necessarily, any person would do (I know tons of secrets about ALL SORTS of famous people). As it is, most of it sounds like me filling up space until the writing is done, rather than being compelled to tell a story or explore a character that legitimately interests me. You don’t have to get mad to write an angry song, but it does help to think about a time when you WERE mad and play off the details. Specificity makes things interesting, even if it’s secret specificity that nobody else will understand but you. Sometimes especially if it’s secret specificity - am I right, Charles R. in Santa Fe?

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 50: Pull the String

This appears to be about a famous person with a terrible secret. It’s not about anyone in particular as far as I know. Maybe it’s about you – Tom Cruise! Or you – John Hodgman! It kind of reminds me of Big Bad World One, mostly because of the A/E ambiguity in the verse. Believe it or not, that acoustic riff in the verse is an idea that’s been floating around in my head since I was about 17 – it’s a relief to finally get that one out the door. Who’s next!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: I am listening now to this song for the first time in five years - I’ve never played this one live, haven’t really thought about it since the day I uploaded it. Love that E over A thing. I am realizing now it reminds me of the piano lick between verse couplets in the Donald Fagen song “New Frontier” (oops, sorry Donald). Mix needs a lot of help, I seem to have layered myself into muddy territory during the pre choruses. Whoa, right, forgot about this bridge - what the? Abrupt, chopped off ending for extra drama, got it.

OK. Some good and bad here. On the plus side, I think most of the music is coming from an original place, or at least I don’t hear the endless parade of standard JoCo tricks I usually resort to when I’m out of ideas. Maybe that’s just because it’s been so long since I’ve heard this song that I don’t even remember how to play it right now, but the chord changes sound kind of fresh but catchy, which is the whole point of a pop song. I like the textural change-ups a lot, the way it gets big and small and loud and quiet. I was ashamed of the bridge the first time I heard it again, but listening a second time I think it’s kind of nice - it’s all new territory within the song, and I think the buildup thing works pretty well with the noisy guitars and everything. All of that stuff sounds to me like at least I was still inventing things at this point. Guitars are not awful. Lead vocal performance actually has a nice vibe to it, as if I cared about what I was singing, which is not always something I am able to capture when I’m singing into a microphone.

The biggest problem for me is the lyrics. I fell into the classic trap where the song is just about one thing and every line is just another way to describe that thing in a not very interesting way. Those kinds of songs can certainly work, but this one centers on a pretty nonspecific and low stakes idea, and it simply doesn’t generate much heat. Also, there are a bunch of phrases in there that sound a little pat to me: “they all want in,” “underneath your skin,” “call your lawyer.” It sounds like a Glen Frey song from 1984, where you’re “in the night” and this or that thing is “dangerous” because something is happening “in your heart” or maybe “on the streets of this city.” Oy.

I’ve written a lot of songs like this in my life, ones that should be good but are not because they lack some essential unnameable thing. This is the one you leave off the album, or you put aside for a while and then try re-writing later once you have starved it of enough attention that it’s ready to play ball. With more time I might have solved the problem by finding something personal to write about - not me necessarily, any person would do (I know tons of secrets about ALL SORTS of famous people). As it is, most of it sounds like me filling up space until the writing is done, rather than being compelled to tell a story or explore a character that legitimately interests me. You don’t have to get mad to write an angry song, but it does help to think about a time when you WERE mad and play off the details. Specificity makes things interesting, even if it’s secret specificity that nobody else will understand but you. Sometimes especially if it’s secret specificity - am I right, Charles R. in Santa Fe?

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 49: Make You Cry

Sometime in this week I found this guitar figure that hypnotized me into playing it for about a hundred hours straight. I wish I had picked something that was a little easier to play, because it drove me crazy during the recording process. My poor, stubby little fingers! I don’t think I’ve done a song for Thing a Week that’s just guitar and vocals, and this one seemed particularly suited to it, so there you are. It’s another love song from a crazy person – this guy wants to win the girl so he can punish her for not loving him. I guess. He certainly seems confused and angry and sad. Do NOT hang out with him.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yeah hey, this one’s a pretty song isn’t it? People ask all the time, which comes first, words or music? In this case it was definitely music, I spent the week pacing around, playing and building this guitar part long before I had any idea what the song would be about. This style of guitar playing reminds me of You Ruined Everything, Drinking with You, and also So Far So Good: picky and folky, thumb working the bass notes. It’s kind of a Bob Dylan via Paul Simon thing. It’s very satisfying to me musically because I get to do everything - it’s a real ARRANGEMENT, not just a bunch of strummy chords.

Guitar part is doubled and very hard to play, so it’s no wonder it took me a while to record. I’ve done this live a few times with Paul and Storm, and my fingers are still not great at playing it. Bridge: three part harmony, all bluegrass-like, brings a tear to my eye it does. There’s something about the sound of those simple harmonies that plugs right into my emotional ache center. All in all I’d say this is a pretty good effort.

This is one of many I’ve written in the category of “songs about assholes.” It’s a classic song writing trick - start from a moment where you were the wronged party, and then write from the perspective of the bad guy. “I broke your heart” is a lot more interesting than “You broke my heart.” And it’s perversely fun to try to get inside the head of someone who is clearly crazy, or evil, or otherwise out of balance. What this guy’s doing doesn’t even really make any sense, it’s just an extremely unhealthy obsession that’s probably super annoying to everyone involved. It’s a twisted concept, and set in such a sweet sounding musical context it crosses wires in all sorts of pleasing ways.

This is very near the end of Thing a Week. I’m getting sad all over again.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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.

Thing a Week 48: The Big Boom

Last weekend when I was staying with some friends in Pennsylvania, there was a very loud noise that woke me up. It was thunder. But it was crazy thunder – it seemed to last about a minute and a half, and it wasn’t a bang, it was this huge, diffuse roar. And after it stopped all the car alarms were going off. It sounded like the end of the world.

At least that’s what I thought when I sat bolt upright in bed and reached for my car keys and a weapon. My first thought, probably before I was fully awake, was that someone or something had scraped Philadelphia out of the Earth, and that I was going to have to grab some provisions, get in the car and head north. I don’t know why this would be my default explanation for a loud noise. I suppose it means I’m a little on edge.

At first this was about a loud boom that led to nothing, but it didn’t take long before I realized it would be better if it was about a loud boom that really did signify the end of the world. The Big Boom. And then I changed Philadelphia to Michigan because there are too many syllables in Philadelphia. The rest of it writes and records and mixes itself!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This track suffers quite a bit from my DIY home studio limitations. No drummer, that’s the worst part. The loop libraries I have usually let me get pretty close to faking it, but I can really hear in this track that it’s just canned drums, there’s just no blood and guts in there. I’m also just generally not good at rocking onto tape. Of all the styles of music I tried to produce during Thing a Week, this was the hardest to get right - I think there’s a lot more subtlety to the recording and mixing process with this genre than you might think. It also helps to have a real amp, and some people who can really play. I like to rock, I just don’t always know how.

Things I like: the riff in the verse, the background vocals in the chorus, the minor major 7th chord at the end of the chorus, the bass guitar’s solo moment at the end of the bridge/solo section.

Things I don’t like: the general lack of testicles, the reappearance of one of my favorite harmonic crutches (the walkdown from F# minor, as seen in Chiron Beta Prime), the meh bridge/solo section (I need 16 bars of something, STAT!), and something about the vocal that I can’t put my finger on but has a lot to do with me not knowing how to make rock music.

Lyrically it gets close, but I think there’s just too much exposition, too much specificity and not enough evocative language. The guy is explaining too much, he should be more emotional and less able to express clearly what’s going on. Or at least that would be one direction to try, it could just be a flawed concept.

I still remember that feeling of waking up that night, that thing where your body’s awake but your brain is not, where you’re all pre-mammalian impulse and you just want to GET OUT. I think it’s what people refer to as night terrors, and it has happened to me only a couple of times. I was under some stress - great things were happening, but a lot was still hanging in the air somewhere between success and failure. Thing a Week One had just been put up at CDBaby, I was doing a bunch of Hodgman book tour stuff, and I was just setting up my very first all-me, out of town show in Seattle. It was also nearly the end of Thing a Week. I was tired of my weekly songwriting deadline, but I was also staring into an uncertain void at the end of it, riding right into a wall of clouds.

Which is not dissimilar to how I’m feeling now. Have I mentioned this new album? I have? Well, it’s called Artificial Heart, and it’s available for purchase on my website, and coming soon to all your favorite digital stores. I’m very proud of it, and I’m getting great feedback from lots of people, but it doesn’t make me worry any less. The last few years have been pretty amazing, and the old songs know exactly what to do - these new ones are just babies. They could fall! On top of that, I’m still feeling a little stretched in the danger department, getting ready to travel around for three weeks with a band opening for They Might Be Giants (who do I think I am exactly?).

Fittingly for this post, this September leg of touring ends in Philadelphia - AS WILL THE WORLD!

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Artificial Heart

IT’S HERE!

The brand new album produced by TMBG’s John Flansburgh, lots of new songs, each one more awesome than the last.

You can buy it right now from my store and many other online digital music merchants. ]]> http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/09/03/artificial-heart/feed/ 0 http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/08/30/multitasking/ http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/08/30/multitasking/#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:42:50 +0000 JoCo http://www.jonathancoulton.com/?p=2278 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.

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!

Thing a Week 47: I’m Your Moon

A few people suggested I do a song about Pluto, and I thought it was a fine idea. It was turning around in my head last week when the first line of the chorus came to me, as if from deep space.

As you certainly know by now, Pluto is not a planet anymore. Just yesterday the International Astronomical Union made it official by redefining “planet.” Pluto is a now considered a dwarf planet, along with a few other small, icy spherical things out there. Obviously very upsetting to Pluto. As you are also no doubt aware, Pluto’s moon Charon is kind of unusual: it’s about half the size of Pluto, which is pretty large for a moon. And it doesn’t orbit around Pluto, they actually orbit around each other, faces locked, like dancers. You wouldn’t be crazy to think of them as a double dwarf planet.

What I’m getting to is this: Charon sings this song to Pluto.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This is probably an even more impenetrable riddle song than Under the Pines. I forget because it’s so obvious to me that it’s about Pluto, but listening just now I realize there’s not really any way you’d know that unless I told you. In spite of that, it’s become an important part of the repertoire, especially in the live acoustic show.

One reason for that is that it’s a better song. Actually in my opinion it’s a little hacky - it’s a “space song,” you know, I can hear myself dipping into the bag of tricks for stuff that sounds like that. The Aadd2, the slathered reverb and delay. But the concept works so much better - this song expresses a more specific and complicated sentiment than what’s going on with Leonard Nimoy and Bigfoot. So even if you don’t know the story, it still comes across as meaningful and sweet and kind of deep. Also there’s no style parody happening (just some slightly lazy writing and arranging). I give myself points for some interesting guitar playing instead of just strummy strummy all the time. And the way the bridge wheezes to a disorienting stop feels like a good choice. Less reverb was called for though, for sure.

This is one of those songs that a lot of people really latch onto. I just got a little weepy while listening to it because I thought of all the stories people have told me about singing it to their newborns and playing it at their weddings. I was just thinking about Pluto when I wrote it, but since it left my hands it’s been infused with the essence of all these other relationships. And so now the Pluto thing really is just a metaphor, and when I hear it or sing it I think about all those real people feeling things. Which is awesome - I love hearing that songs of mine have taken up residence in people’s emotional lives. That’s the point of songs, isn’t it?

I have no memory of writing this one either.

Listening just now, I realize that the lyrics and melody have evolved a little over the years of me playing this on the acoustic. Small changes, but they stick out - I think I’m more a fan of the acoustic version. That’s one of the side effects of the breakneck pace of Thing a Week, where the writing happened mere hours away from the final, permanent recording. (Yeesh, just writing it out that way makes it sound like a bad idea.) There was never any time for a song to sit and breathe and grow up. I still think this is a good song and I’m very proud of it, but I think it had more to give.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

They will never open for me, they are rock stars.

Thing a Week 46: You Ruined Everything

I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling – I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it’s not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This is one of those songs that I feel grateful to have found. It’s by far the most directly personal song in Thing a Week, and probably in my entire catalog. I love it because it expresses how I really feel about this very important part of my life without ducking for cover cover behind a giant squid or a mad scientist character. It’s a love letter to my kids, one that I think has enough emotional complexity in it that they’ll understand it over and over again in different ways as they get older. Or not. My daughter recently asked me, “Daddy, is there a different kind of ruined?” Well yeah, sort of.

Personal songs feel perilous to me. It’s scary to reveal what I think and feel about something, even in conversation with a single person, let alone with the whole internet. There’s the risk that I’ll reveal something about myself that I think is universal, and instead everyone will finally know what a monster I am. That doesn’t seem to be the case with this one - I’ve heard from lots of parents that this hits pretty close to home, and even from some non parents who find that this describes their romantic relationships pretty well. Those fears aside, I find it very hard to say honest things about myself in a song without it sounding like the sappy, maudlin, navel gazing stuff I used to write in high school. Somehow I got away with it here, but usually if you describe how you feel about something and then just make it a song lyric, it stinks. That’s why it’s often easier and somehow MORE honest to start with an imaginary point of view and let your true self sneak in. 

I have no memory of writing this song.

If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t just do a plain old acoustic/vocal recording. I’ve been performing it live that way for years, and it just works better that way. It’s a simple song, and it communicates just fine without any bells and whistles. I like tucking it away at the end of the set, a little quiet moment when I can close my eyes and think about my kids, far away, fast asleep in Brooklyn.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 45: Mr. Fancy Pants

I tried to write something else, believe me. But this stupid line about Mr. Fancy Pants having the fanciest pants just wouldn’t get out of my head, so I was forced to follow it through to whatever this is. I’ll warn you, it’s a short one. A nice little amuse bouche (but for your ears). Even so I kind of like it – some kind of strange morality lesson about beating Mr. Fancy Pants at his own game. Or something. Anyways!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS:

I remember a moment from this week when I was riding my bike around Prospect Park with the first line of this song stuck in my head, and wishing it would leave so I could get to work on WRITING SOMETHING. I would often ride when I needed to clear my head and find a new idea. I found that if I put my body into some kind of autopilot mode - riding, walking, driving - it would sometimes occupy just enough of my brain’s bandwidth to shut off the censors, and then something would bubble up. It didn’t always work, and in this case I ended up right where I started, with the same dumb non-idea I was trying to escape.

As it turns out, this song was a good one, though you never could have guessed. All I had was a bouncy feel, a not-really-rhyming line about pants, and an otherwise empty idea bin. I decided to try writing without a subject, just following the words where they led. In this case they led back to pants. It’s not about anything really, though it certainly pretends to be. I like how it leaves you at the end, with a hollow victory over who knows what, not really knowing how you’re supposed to feel or who the villain was.

I love the chords in the bridge. They’re something I found more with my fingers than with my brain. It’s almost like this song was generated by the non-thinking parts of me, by the systems level utilities - sitting down and typing gibberish until something gets traction. Strangely, it was the first time I tried this technique during Thing a Week, and I wish I had surrendered to it earlier. I relied on it quite a bit for this new album, and it often led to much more honest and personal expression than I could have gotten to otherwise. It’s very hard to write about nothing for very long, and the real stuff sneaks out of you when you’re not looking.

I was certainly thinking of They Might Be Giants once I got to the recording process - accordion plus electric guitar, keep it short and sweet, make it fun. I wanted it to sound like a marching band falling down some stairs. Of course the real magic in this song wasn’t released until I began performing it live on the Zendrum, at which point I was finally able to get to how it really sounded in my head when I first found it, which is to say “insane and kind of about pants.”

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 44: Big Bad World One

Enough with the bigfoots and zombies, this one is pretty straightforward subject matter. The headline is “Sadsack Can’t Find Love,” which is just about as classic as it gets. I have spent more time than I would like to admit hanging out by the food table at parties, because it makes me look like I’m busy with something instead of just afraid to talk to anybody.

I like the way the title phrase sounds out of context – it seems like maybe it might mean something, but you can’t really say what. And I’m incredibly relieved to have broken out of the endless series of sad songs in the key of D that I appear to have been working on. It feels nice to do something a little different. This one’s in A, D and G! Crazy!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Right on. I love this song. Many classic JoCo tricks in there, but somehow it all adds up to something that sounds pretty fresh to me. Put down a nice crispy bed of doubled acoustic guitars and your pop song will sleep comfortably, that’s for sure. Our old friend the m7b5 chord is there (surprise!) in the kicker line of the chorus (“me zero”), but it’s not in the same role it usually is when I deploy it - I don’t have the patience right now to figure out what it’s doing there exactly, it’s probably best understood a substitution for something else. Doesn’t matter, it’s delicious!

(Requisite comment about the mix/arrangement: not enough dynamic range. Oh well.)

There’s a lot about this song I don’t quite get harmonically. It starts with this AM7 suspension thing (stolen from Code Monkey chorus, later redecorated for Pull the String) that’s weirdly ambiguous - it’s actually kind of an E chord played over A. By the end of the first line of the verse we’ve sort of shifted to D as the tonal center. And then in the prechorus we just bust into a section in G like it’s nothing. And then of course that great moment at the end of the bridge where the harmonies hold over the change from a Cadd6 to that AM7 thing. I just love all that wandering. There’s probably some nice music theory that can “explain” all this jumping around any number of ways (I mean, probably?), but what I like about it’s weird, but it’s still nice and pop-friendly. It’s rare that I sit down to strum on a guitar and come up with something that feels new.

The prechorus was a little atom that floated around in my ideas folder for a long time before this song got written, and it just kind of got sucked up into this song. Aside from that fact, I remember almost nothing about writing this one. I just remember how I felt in those weeks. I was out on the edge. Every song was a struggle that started with complete despair. I made decisions quickly and didn’t look back. I had no idea if what I was doing was good or not.

There were a couple of moments during the end of the writing process for this new album where I felt like that - and it felt good in that, “I’m running a triathalon, ow!” way - all tapped out and still somehow things coming out of me. Like getting food poisoning. I can’t possibly have anything left in there, can I? And then too I found the same strange room that I always forget about, the room where all the good songs are. Every time I find myself in that room I think “Well hmm, this is quite nice all these good songs lying around, why don’t I come here all the time?” It’s just that it takes an awful lot of effort and pain to get there.

The songs from this part of Thing a Week are my favorites, I think largely because of their mysterious origins. They came from outer space. They happened during the stretch when I was most able to forget about myself. Maybe I like them because they don’t feel like they’re mine.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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

Thing a Week 43: Under the Pines

Not many people know this, but when Leonard Nimoy did the Bigfoot episode of “In Search Of…” he and the creature hooked up one night and had this crazy fling. These kinds of things never end well, but Bigfoot in particular is a bit of a cad anyway (being mostly wild animal). As you might imagine, Leonard Nimoy came out of the experience somewhat worse for wear.

I’m almost sure that I have stolen this melody from somewhere, or maybe parts of it from lots of places, it sounds very familiar to me. And the bassline – hello? Blue Bayou? At first this was just a “bigfoot broke my heart” song, but I wasn’t getting a lot of traction. It wasn’t until I realized that it was Leonard Nimoy talking that it came together for me. There are just a couple of subtle references to Spock in there, and bigfoot’s name is never mentioned, so if you’re haven’t read this explanation you are either confused, or blissfully unaware that it’s about Bigfoot and Leonard Nimoy. Godspeed.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Ah, a classic Thursday desperation song. Never in a million years would I have TRIED to write this song, rather I only would have ALLOWED it to happen in the absence of any other alternative.

Not that it’s so terrible. I actually think this one deserved a better place in JoCo history than it got. I like the melody, it’s simple but pretty solidly built. There are some nice moments in the lyrics, in particular I love the “bag of suet” joke, and I love the entirety of the third verse. In terms of solving the puzzle (describing a love affair between Bigfoot and Leonard Nimoy without mentioning either one) it succeeds very well. Here are the problems:

Arrangement - pfft. Not a lot there. It starts from style parody, which is always a dangerous game, especially when you veer away from the style and just start throwing stuff at the wall without caring if it sticks. The terrible chorus guitar in the choruses and those background vocals just don’t make sense to me, and they’re there only because I didn’t come up with anything else to fill the space. At the end of the day I really just copped a bassline.

Subtlety - almost nobody who hears this song figures out that it’s about Bigfoot and Leonard Nimoy. It’s too clever by half. I can’t imagine what you would think of this song if you didn’t know what it was about. It would just seem bizarre, unfunny, and not very interesting.

Goofballism - obviously I am trapped by this a lot. It’s rare to come across a song that is completely goofy and still emotionally stirring enough to matter to someone. Many would say that’s my wheelhouse, and in fact I just wrote myself a new bio in which I claimed that it was. I frequently try for that combination, and it feels wonderful when I hit it right, but the truth is I fail more often than not. When you write about goofy things, you’re giving all the other songs in the world a head start. I failed to back this one up with much of anything, and I think that’s why it fails to achieve liftoff.

To be clear, I am not anti-goofball. There’s nothing wrong with funny music, I don’t care what you say. I listened to Weird Al’s latest album Alpocalypse and was reminded that while there’s a ton of funny music out there, only a small fraction of it is done really well. Weird Al is the undisputed champion, and he elevates the genre like nobody else because he’s got a great musical brain and has honed the hell out of his craft.

It doesn’t matter what kind of music you’re doing, death metal or novelty songs, it has to be honest and it has to be great.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Wil Wheaton, Marian Call, and Vi Hart.

I trust this will please you. More announcements about more performers IN THE FUTURE…

Thing a Week 42: Creepy Doll

I don’t know what’s going on with this one, I just decided earlier this week that it was time to write a song about a creepy doll. I was thinking about various 70s horror movies that scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. Back then you didn’t need to torture people with chainsaws and drills to make a scary movie, it was enough just to have a doll that kept showing up. Or maybe a clown. I couldn’t keep a straight face though, somewhere in the middle of the song the doll just becomes not so much creepy as annoying. And before you post it in the comments, yes I know that it sounds like Bacteria in the beginning – it’s the same Glock sound and the same key, and kind of the same music. Sue me. We’re on song number 42 here people…

Also, just a little merch plug: I’ve just added T-shirts for “Re: Your Brains” to my CafePress store. The image is the song lyrics typed in memo form decorated with a delightful blood spatter. Buy zombies, buy!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yes, well, victory of course. This has become an important part of the repertoire. I didn’t know it at the time obviously, you never do. As a recording I don’t think it’s super great - I find it too slow, though part of that is because I’ve been playing it a lot faster live. And I wrote beyond my abilities on the guitar. I can imagine it being a lot more awesome when played by someone who can really play. Some nice elements in there I guess, though they sound a little pat to me now. I was already bracing myself for criticism about using the same spooky music box trick I used in Bacteria (and would later use in Still Alive). The reverse thing at the end is cool, but I had a devil of a time getting it to smoothly transition from the forward version to the reversed version.

Song-wise, I think it’s a good one. The chord progression sounds kind of unique to me, it wanders and is spooky, but doesn’t really hit you over the head with the usual spooky music tricks. And it’s funny, but it has enough subtlety to it that it doesn’t get too annoying. I do love the turn when you realize the doll is just kind of irritating. And the twist at the end, while standard in this genre, feels CORRECT anyway. I was thinking about that Stephen King story with the wind-up monkey, and I was thinking of the doll in Trilogy of Terror, and probably a couple other things I can’t remember.

That line about “if you really need that much honey” actually comes from my past. I had a girlfriend in high school whose Dad had a reputation in the family for being something of a type-A personality, and it’s true, he was absolutely nuts about turning lights off, not wasting food, and saving money. For some reason he bought powdered milk, mixed it up, and then served that to his family in equal proportions with regular whole milk - WHY? Nobody knows. He was the kind of guy who would gingerly slide the turn signal arm into place when he turned on the blinker, because he wanted the switch to last a long time. He drove everyone crazy. There was a framed photo somewhere in the house of him posed and smiling in a suit. His son, my girlfriend’s older brother, had taped a little comic-style talk bubble to it that said “Hey! Do you really need that much jelly?” I thought it was a hilarious character assassination, so I stole it for this. 

It’s all the little secrets you have about where things come from that make you feel a little fraudulent sometimes. The audience see a magic trick, but I see a box with a trap door in it that I bought at the magic store. I know that’s how everybody works, because I’ve seen bits of my life in things that my friends have created. It feels good, like a little secret shout out. And then I wonder about this particular reference. Does that family remember that joke as well as I do? And have they heard this song and did they recognize it? 

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thank you for your alerts about what was broken and your comments about what has changed. Team JoCo is fixing things as they come to our attention, please let me know in this thread if you’re still having trouble with something and we’ll see what we can do. I have other long term plans for a bunch of stuff around these parts, this is really phase one we’re looking at now, so don’t panic.

In fact, save your panic for 12 noon because that’s when I am throwing the big switch that puts a bunch of new cabins on sale for JoCo Cruise Crazy 2. You may have noticed, we sold out of most kinds of cabins really quickly and have been out of them for weeks. We’ve got another round of cabins for you to decimate, and hope that you will do so. Expect me to report back here later about what I did wrong, or broke, or learned about how to not do things next time.

Whee!

JoCo Cruise Crazy 2

It’s happening again!
February 19-26 2012, Southern Caribbean.
Book now! ]]> http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/07/12/joco-cruise-crazy-2-2/feed/ 0 http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/07/12/maintenance-time/ http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2011/07/12/maintenance-time/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:42:25 +0000 JoCo http://www.jonathancoulton.com/?p=2176 Just a heads up for those of you who spend all day refreshing this site to see if anything new happened (nope!): late tonight and tomorrow, some server monkeys are going to do some stuff and move this site over to a new server. While the DNS propagates some things will be read-only – the forums, the wiki, the comments. Don’t panic! Once your corner of the web gets the new info you’ll be back to read-write mode. You might not even notice.

Actually you will, because the site will have a little teensy weensy bit of a visual change, not a redesign mind you (which is long overdue), just a bit of a haircut. And we’re moving to Vanilla V2, which should be nicer looking, more secure, faster, and just different enough to make some of you COMPLETELY FURIOUS. But nothing should be broken and really we’ll all be better off.

Or, this whole thing could come crashing down. We don’t really know. You know what, why don’t you fill up the bathtub with fresh water just in case?

Thing a Week 41: Seahorse

I was thinking about how with seahorses, the males are the ones who carry the fertilized eggs until they hatch. And then of course I started thinking of a sad seahorse, whose female had left him alone to care for the kids – AGAIN. I’m pretty sure this is not actually the way things really are for seahorses. But if it was, you know, this song would make sense.

I can’t believe we’re on Thing a Week V.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Goink! Thing a Week V? Apparently I still hadn’t done the math to figure out the factors of 52. Ten is not a factor of 52, that’s sort of obvious. I guess I was just thinking that albums were ten songs long? Which they’re not. Who knows!

I keep reviewing the other blog posts chronologically close to the original Thing a Week one, and around here is where I can recognize the beginnings of me becoming too busy to blog properly. I was falling behind on everything, and it has stayed that way ever since. One of the first things to go was my ability to keep on top of things that people were sending me - stuff they made, stuff they noticed that was cool or stuff they found that was about me. Early on when I wasn’t getting much of these, I had the time to lavish attention on them in a way that they deserved. I still find it remarkable that anybody cares, and I still treasure every little drawing, video, story, half-pony half-monkey monster that comes across my radar. Unfortunately if I spent as much time studying and celebrating them as I wanted to, I would: 1) have no time to make music, and 2) be absorbed into my own ego so completely that the heat from my self-love would explode our solar system. Lately I’ve been so busy falling behind on things that I don’t even have the mind space for Twitter - TWITTER! Who doesn’t have time for Twitter?

But hey, listen to the mix on this song would you? Not too shabby. Drum loop that’s not too egregiously out of place, those lush vocals in the chorus (the patented JoCo doubled, hard-panned SPREAD (not actually patented, or mine)). What’s nice about it is that it hangs together as a whole really well - usually I can hear all the little individual parts sticking out, but this sounds pleasantly cohesive to me. Bassline in the verses: aces. Edie Brickell tremolo guitar in the left channel: you’re welcome. And my favorite, the little rush at the end of the chorus, which I think is a guitar strum run backwards.

The song is pretty. A fine melody, maybe not a lot of meat in the lyrics. I was consciously trying to write simply, to write Hemingway lyrics. I remember thinking it would be a challenge to use all one-syllable words. Of course by making this about a Seahorse, I failed out of the gate, but it was a nice guiding principle. And it’s sweet, if a little fluffy and inconsequential.

The bridge shares some DNA with the B-section of the verses from “I Crush Everything.” I can’t remember the precise details anymore, but I think I remember that line about the waves above going up and down trying to sneak its way into “Crush.” Or maybe it was the other way around? Either way, two songs about sad sea creatures:they’re bound to sound like siblings.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Artificial Heart (the new record):

Waiting on the mastering folks right now, but it’s done from my end of things. Shooting for a release date roundabout the end of August/beginning of September, but waiting for a couple of last minute things to happen before I announce any actual date. I’m really excited about it – working with Flansburgh was fantastic fun and incredibly fruitful. I think you guys are going to like it.

I will be doing presales as soon as I can get that ready, most likely sometime in August. I’m working on a kinda sorta premium superfan pack that will contain a bunch of extra exclusive goodies. The CD packaging and all those extra goodies are being designed by friend, design genius, and crazy person Sam Potts (www.sampottsinc.com). It’s going to make for a very smart looking package of stuff. I’m not even going to call it a package of stuff, I’m going to call it an EXPERIENCE, because that’s what it is. More on this soon.

JoCo Cruise Crazy 2 (the new cruise):

We quietly launched our new Scarface-built booking site on June 17th and were immediately overwhelmed with bookings. The first 250 sold in a few hours, before we even had time to figure out what was going on and promote it to anyone. Soon after we sold through our inventory of cabins, and have been waiting for gears to turn and checks to clear so that we can get more inventory up and for sale. That is happening very soon. (I know we’ve been saying that for a while, but it has always felt true – all I can say is, we’re closer to it now than every before. Believe!)

Confirmed talent onboard includes me, Paul and Storm, John Hodgman, David Rees, Paul F. Tompkins, and MC Frontalot, with plenty more yet to be announced. It’s going to be a ton of fun. Watch our various blogs and twitter feeds for the announcement about when those new cabins will go on sale, and get yourself a seat PRONTO!

Touring (the new touring):

I’ll be doing a few of my own shows, as well as an awful lot of opening for They Might Be Giants over the next few months. A complete list follows, and details and tickets for all shows can be found on the shows page. Here are a couple of highlights for you, and then a list that nobody will care enough to read all the way through.

A Smaller Boat – on August 19th I’m playing a show on The Jewel, which is apparently a boat of some kind. It’s a band show, a rock cruise in the East River starring ME.

PAX Prime – it’s confirmed, I’ll be at PAX again this year the end of August, playing with the band. Wouldn’t it be great if I could sell you the new album that weekend? What a smart business thing that would be for me to have planned.

Dragon*Con – for the first time ever, I’ll be there. Please be gentle. On Friday the 2nd I’ll be with the band at my favorite Atlanta venue, the Variety Playhouse for the incredible ALBUM RELEASE PARTY, where history will be made. Paul and Storm will be there too. I’ll also be playing acoustically as part of a larger on campus evening show on Saturday night, plus a couple of panels and things. I will also slay a dragon.

Opening for They Might Be Giants – I’m a fan, you’re a fan, listen, these are going to all be great shows. July 29th at the Williamsburg Waterfront is a free show with me on acoustic. July 30th at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park is the same, except it isn’t free or in Williamsburg. The rest of the Giants shows in September and November will be band shows all. I hope you like rock.

Complete list of shows that involve me:

July 29 Brooklyn, NY – Williamsburg Waterfront with TMBG (acoustic, free show!) – bit.ly/join-us-brooklyn

July 30 Asbury Park, NJ – Stone Pony with TMBG (acoustic) – bit.ly/join-us-asbury-park

August 19 New York, NY – aboard The Jewel, under the stars on the East River (band) – tktwb.tw/qii5ci

August 26-28 Seattle, WA – PAX Prime, merch boothin’ it, big show, etc. (band) – prime.paxsite.com

September 2 Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse ALBUM RELEASE PARTY with Paul and Storm (band) – bit.ly/kFAulc

September 3 Atlanta, GA – Dragon*Con, location TBD, with Paul and Storm and others (acoustic) – www.dragoncon.org/

All the rest of these are band shows opening for TMBG:

Sept 8 New Haven, CT – Toad’s Place – bit.ly/join-us-new-haven

Sept 9 Great Barrington, MA – Mahaiwe Theater – bit.ly/join-us-great-barrington

Sept 10 Concord, NH – Capitol Center for the Arts – bit.ly/join-us-concord

Sept 11 Norwich, VT – Upper Valley Events Center – bit.ly/join-us-norwichvt

Sept 13 Ithaca, NY – State Theater – bit.ly/join-us-ithaca

Sept 14 Pittsburgh, PA – Byham Theater – bit.ly/join-us-pittsburgh

Sept 15 Rochester, NY – Harro East Ballroom – bit.ly/join-us-rochester

Sept 16 Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom – tktwb.tw/join-us-cleveland

Sept 17 Detroit, MI – Majestic Theater – bit.ly/join-us-detroit

Sept 18 Grand Rapids, MI – Intersection – bit.ly/join-us-grand-rapids

Sept 20 Cincinnati, OH – Southgate House – ticketf.ly/join-us-cinci

Sept 22 Indianapolis, IN – The Vogue – bit.ly/join-us-indianapolis

Sept 23 Chicago, IL – Riviera Theatre – bit.ly/join-us-chicago

Sept 24 St. Louis, MO – The Pageant – bit.ly/join-us-st-louis

Sept 25 Tulsa, OK – Cain’s Ballroom – bit.ly/join-us-tulsa

Sept 27 Nashville, TN – Cannery Ballroom – bit.ly/join-us-nashville

Sept 28 Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel – bit.ly/join-us-asheville

Sept 29 Richmond, VA – The National – bit.ly/join-us-richmond

Sept 30 Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts – bit.ly/join-us-philadelphia

Nov 4 Salt Lake City, UT – The Depot – bit.ly/join-us-slc

Nov 5 Boise, ID – Knitting Factory – ticketf.ly/join-us-boise

Nov 6 Spokane, WA – Knitting Factory – ticketf.ly/join-us-spokane

Nov 8 Vancouver, BC – Venue – bit.ly/join-us-vancouverbc

Nov 9 Seattle, WA – Showbox SoDo – bit.ly/join-us-seattle

Nov 10 Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom – bit.ly/join-us-portland

Nov 11 Arcata, CA – Van Duzer Theatre – bit.ly/join-us-arcata

Nov 12 San Francisco, CA – Fillmore – bit.ly/join-us-san-fran12th

Nov 13 San Francisco, CA – Fillmore – bit.ly/join-us-san-fran13th

Nov 16 Anaheim, CA – House of Blues – bit.ly/join-us-anaheim

Nov 17 San Diego, CA – Belly Up – bit.ly/join-us-san-diego

Whew.

Thing a Week 40: SkyMall

Ah, the joys of travel. I actually enjoy browsing the SkyMall – never mind the delicious array of products for the person who already owns all the world’s products; the copy alone is worth the price of admission, which is zero, since Skymall is free. Look into it.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Um, excuse me, that is a fantastic intro - that little McCartney bass riff right before all the other instruments is CANDY. I was bracing myself for this recording to be not so good, but it’s pretty decent actually. Maybe a little too busy an arrangement, but I’m not quite sure how I pulled off such a totally believable guitar rock thing. I feel like that was an ongoing struggle through that year, one of my weaknesses that the process really hammered on until it was much less of a weakness. I think that by this time of the year I had figured it out pretty well. And hey, check out that bridge! The lyrics there crack me up, it’s an interesting but not jarring little harmonic shift, and the arrangement hits all the right spots for me with the delay on the vocal and the washy wall of sound. 

I could have skipped that guitar solo. It’s not terrible, but it’s also not necessary. If I were to do this one today I’d take the bridge through some kind of fall apart moment and break the whole thing way down for the start of verse 3. I’m a fan of the verse 3 break down.

I also wish for a little more depth in the lyrics. I mean, the thing is about a guy who likes SkyMall, so I guess what are you gonna do? I fell into the trap of “list of ridiculous SkyMall items” in verse 2, but I’d say that failing is mitigated by the line about the Santa in which (in my mind anyway) the guy is talking to himself in the voice of SkyMall copy, as if he’s fallen completely under its sway. It’s a subtle thing, but I like it.

Really what would be excellent is if I could have gotten to a little more emotion. This guy’s on the road all the time, and he’s obviously got someone at home that he misses. “O’Hare is nice this time of year” is a pretty sad line when you think about it. And judging from my breathy vocal performance in that verse I was trying to convey a little sadness there. And I find a LOT of tragedy in the first line of verse 3 “I love you best when I’m away.” But all that gets swept away by the joke that the real reason he’s excited to get home is that he can’t wait to get his hands on the wine-holding bear statue. Honka honka! Again, the song is called SkyMall, it’s going to pull you in that direction pretty hard.

I don’t think I had a ton of travel under my belt at this point in the year, so maybe I hadn’t found that particular source of sadness yet. I had started doing a little touring, and of course having done long stretches with Hodgman on his book tour I had a taste of it. I always try to keep my tours as short as possible, because long trips tend to make me miserable. It’s a combination of highs and lows - the incredible rush and joy of playing for a crowd of people, alternating with large chunks of time waiting around, driving in vans, or counting Tshirts in crappy hotel rooms. It’s weirdly dehumanizing. I sometimes feel like pieces of my personality start to fall away - I go off twitter, I fail to contact friends that I have in town for the standard, unsatisfying rushed meal and catch-up conversation. And of course I miss my family and my home and all my stuff. SkyMall really isn’t that much of a comfort. I wish I were still young enough to just do drugs all the time - I get why that’s a thing in the rock and roll biz.

In September I’ll have a new record out and will be opening for They Might Be Giants for a stretch of over three weeks. That’s the longest I will ever have been out, and I’m curious to see to what extent I go to pieces. I’ll have a lot of company of course - my own band, plus all the TMBG guys who I know pretty well, so I’m certain it will be really fun. TMBG are serious, hard-working road warriors, and some of the people in that band have been dealing with long tours away from family for years and years, so maybe I’ll pick up some tips (or perhaps a couple of these).

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

The microphone goes into my laptop through an audio interface. The laptop is running Ableton Live. I’ve got an audio track in there that’s listening to the mic input and running a plugin called The Mouth. That plugin does a lot of awesome things, but in this case it takes the audio and um. I don’t know exactly what it does. It sounds to me like it’s taking the audio input, and using some algorithm to retune the input to a single pitch at several different octaves, the relative volumes of those octaves being determined by the frequency content of the input. You know, robot voice. Kind of a vocoder I guess? But more juicy. I’ve listened to just the 100% wet effect, and it’s almost like it’s carving out space for whatever the input note is – it’s like you can hear the shadow of the melody as it shifts up and down the octaves.

Anyway, put that all in a box and say the effect is weirdifying the input and outputting a repitched copy of what I’m singing. That pitch is determined by midi messages. So I also have a midi track in Ableton Live. The iPhone is running an app called TouchOSC which is sending OSC data over wifi to an app on the laptop called Osculator, which is set up to translate certain OSC messages into midi note events, and then sending those events to the track in Ableton Live, which is then routed to the midi input of The Mouth on track 1. I’m playing a little onscreen keyboard, and that changes the note that The Mouth plays when I sing.

I am also texting three wives and two girlfriends at the same time!

Hope that explains it. It’s probably more than you wanted to know, huh?

Thing a Week 39: Pizza Day

In my school, it was Friday. The pizza wasn’t any good at all, but you can’t really argue with pizza at school can you?

Those of you who’ve spoken to me in the last 24 hours may be surprised that there’s a song here – until about 2:00 this afternoon I had pretty much nothing. I was all ready to blow it off and go play some tennis when this came to me. The music is an idea that’s been floating around in my head forever, but the sad guy singing about pizza was one of those things that just bubbled up from somewhere. It’s by necessity a pretty simple structure and arrangement, but I kind of like it that way. It’s economical. And recording it also felt very old school for some reason, reminded me of high school, sitting in my room at home with a four track cassette and a chorus pedal. And maybe a piece of pizza.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: One of the “bolt from the blue” songs, born of desperation and despair. I’m just now remembering that originally this melody had different lyrics: it was a love song for Dana Scully. No, I can’t remember them, and I wouldn’t share them with you if I could because they obviously were not good enough to graduate to song-dom. Even then it felt a little too on the nose.

Jeez, this one is a heartbreaker, it makes me really sad. The arrangement could use some work (duh, it was done in two hours), but those vocals at the end of the chorus are great. Still love the concept, though I probably could have eased up a little in verse two - one of the things I think I’ve learned how to do a lot better is write AROUND what I want to say instead of just saying it. There is certainly a bit of distance for this guy, he never says “me” or “I”, and that works pretty well. I do think the lyrics could be stronger if he didn’t directly address what he’s really worried about in verse two. Of course there’s something honest and simple about him talking about lunch tables and wanting it all to be over, but I often find that the knife twists more painfully when you don’t see it coming. Gah, I can picture this kid sitting alone with his little slice of pizza, make it stop.

And you know, I wasn’t the kind of kid in school who didn’t have friends at lunch, so I don’t know why it still hurts me so much to think of this character. In a general sense I was definitely a nerd. I had buck teeth, I liked math, I was pals with the teachers, but various class clown techniques kept my head above water. And then in junior high, one day I woke up and realized I was a gawky kid with the wrong clothes and the wrong haircut and a sweaty underarm problem and ridiculous giant glasses. I had a good friend who had made it across the barriers, maybe had always been there somehow, and I went to great efforts to model myself after him in all the right ways. I spent a couple years feeling extremely uncomfortable all the time about how I looked and moved and acted, and somewhere in there found my way to contact lenses and confidence. By high school I had figured out how to pass as a cool kid, though I was always terribly afraid someone would discover my secret, put glasses on me, and punch me in them.

But those kids. I remember their names still, sometimes even the odd way they walked or the twitchy thing they did with their eyes when they were socially panicked. The super smart kids who talked funny. The kids who really did sit alone, who really had no friends at all. I hope I was nice to them, I always tried to be a nice to everyone, but I bet I was a jerk sometimes. I certainly didn’t go out of my way to sit with them at lunch. And I still remember how it felt before I put on my cool kid skin, the blind fear that came with certain situations - the AWFUL feeling of being different and having someone call attention to it. That’s the worst thing I can imagine, having to slog all through your school years feeling that way. I’m glad I’m a super cool rock star now with no insecurities.

Oh, and I just got this, it’s about Friday isn’t it? Because of course at this point I was done with Fridays. That was by now the saddest day of the week for me because I was tired, and empty, and slowly shambling week by week toward the day when I could stop writing dumb songs.

This is the last song on Thing a Week Three, and this is where it starts to get really good.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 38: Drinking With You

I don’t know what it is with me and the office crushes – I haven’t had a job in almost a year so you know, it hasn’t really come up. But I find them very sweet, I think because offices are a lot like high school, which is the best time to have a crush. Except when you have an office crush, you are most likely old enough to drink, and so you can go out and get drunk with your crushee, which is also the best.

I am sensitive to the fact that some might misconstrue this song to be not so much a “sweet love song” and more a “pro-date-rape” song. This is not what I mean. I’m talking about that night long after the two of you both know very well what is going on but haven’t acted on it, and you make this mutual but kind of secret decision to “go out for drinks” – and you’re playing it cool on the outside but inside you’re jumping up and down and doing a one-person conga line singing “Going out for dri-hinks! Going out for dri-hinks!”

If you aren’t old enough to drink, don’t go out for drinks with your crush. It’s really not that awesome. Stay in school kids.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yes, yes, yes. To my mind this is a nearly unqualified success - still love the song, not that embarrassed by the mix. I managed to not ruin this by over producing it. I even find the solo to be appropriate, interesting, and dare I say, well-executed (Ebow, baby). This kind of picky acoustic arrangement with the moving bassline is a trick I first discovered in “So Far, So Good” which was week 19. But the chord progression feels pretty fresh to me, there’s even some stuff in there that I’m not exactly sure what it is. I wrote the guitar part first, and it was one of those songs where I just played it and played it a million times before I knew what it was about. I don’t recall where the lyrics started coming to me, but my guess is that it was the kicker line in the chorus, “It’d be nice to go out drinking with you.”

And that’s a good line, if I do say so myself. It’s a concept I haven’t heard before in a love song, not in such a sweet setting anyway, and it feels slightly dangerous - like you shouldn’t talk about that feeling, and anyway if you try you’ll probably screw it up. You can hear my backpedaling in the blog post I wrote at the time. But it’s a real thing, at least it was for me back when I used to go out of the house after 6 PM. My wife and I never worked together, but the beginning of our romantic involvement (we were friends for a long time first) had a lot to do with drinking together at bars in big groups of friends. And that line about discreetly sharing a cab home comes from that period of time when we hadn’t yet gone public to our social circle. Those hours at the end of an already too long evening, trying to outlast everyone else so you can leave together without them noticing that you’re leaving together - that’s still my most direct nostalgic connection to my mid 20’s, and what passed for romance in New York City in those days.

I forget how directly I lift from my own life sometimes, and usually I don’t notice that I’m doing it. That seems crazy because of course, it’s me inside my head all the time. How did I trick myself into thinking I was writing about some imaginary office crush while not noticing until years later (today actually, just now) that I was writing a love song to my wife? It’s such a complete and total deception - when exactly did I stop paying attention to what I was thinking?  

It’s a strange headspace, and I’ve found that I can most easily get there by writing when I really don’t feel like writing - 38 weeks of Thing a Week did the trick in this case. I’m sad that I have to write a song, but here I go. Shuffle sad over to sentimental, and then start making stuff up and see where it leads. It’s a kind of emotionally directed free association, and it’s almost pathetic how well it works once the right switches get flipped on. Because if you’re doing it right, free association is not really “free” at all. In fact it might be the only time you’re ever writing as YOU, because for once, you’ve taken your dumb, scared, self-hating self out of the equation. Something else takes over then, and it doesn’t feel like it’s you. There’s another voice in your head, and you are merely listening to it and repeating what it says.

This is that feeling of being directed by the muse, the kind of writing you can’t remember afterwards, and that somehow makes an end run around all your stupid emotional sentries and gets to something resonant and true. If I had set out to write a love song about my wife, I never in a million years would have started with the sentiment that I liked getting drunk with her back in 1995. I sure did though…

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 37: Rock and Roll Boy

I went trolling for some interesting audio this week over at the Internet Archive – frankly, I’m a little sick of writing songs, and I wanted to flush out the system with a found audio thingie. I found this treasure trove, a collection of kids on cassette in the public domain (if you’ve never been to the Internet Archive, you should check it out – it’s non-profit with an enormous library of, like, everything). It brought back fond memories of yelling nonsense into the grill of a 40-pound tape recorder with a record button you had to lean on and mash down with your whole hand. And I was blown away by six-year-old Justin’s “Rock and Roll Boy,” which begins with the most fantastic opening lines in the history of rock and roll. So I wrote a song around Justin’s vocals. He wasn’t thoughtful enough to provide a third verse or a bridge, and he wandered a bit in terms of key, so I had to improvise. But I really think he had an actual song in his head. Which is more than I can say for myself some weeks…

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Well, hm. I find my backup vocals hilarious: “He loves to live in this crazy crazy town.” And I seem to remember it was quite a bit of work to get the audio to do what I wanted, so that part feels like an accomplishment. But I can’t really say I’d ever, you know, CHOOSE to listen to this song. I like the guitar solo, which is unusual. One thing I would do differently today is not make it three and a half minutes long - a lot of the songs from the new record are just barely two minutes, and they’re just fine that way. There’s just not enough material here to justify so long a song.

Boy was I tired! I can remember making the decision that I was not going to write anything that week, and how relieved I felt. At this point the relentlessness of the weekly schedule was kicking my ass. It was harder and harder to find ideas and tricks that I hadn’t already used at least a couple of times. I think that after you’ve written enough, that happens, in fact I still feel that way today. Like I’m cooking dinner and nobody’s gone shopping in years. Rice? I guess we could have rice again. Rice with chicken? Haven’t had chicken in a couple of meals. Maybe if I put these mushrooms in, nobody will notice that it’s still just rice and chicken. It’s either that or this can of cheese soup I’ve been staring at for six months. Fuck it, let’s open the can.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 36: Not About You

Ah, denial. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going. This one cried out for hand claps from start to finish, but I resisted – the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Funny story: while I was recording this, I got a call from the Gin Blossoms. They want their pre-chorus back.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Egads, what a mix! The weird, short, roomy reverb on the vocal drives me nuts. Overall it’s just too busy and monolithic - there are some good ideas in there, but they haven’t really been featured in a way that keeps them out of each other’s way. It’s like there are a couple of radios playing in the background, I can’t hear anything. What’s that synth doing in there? Do you want the synth or not?

The song is OK, catchy, not too deep though. The setup and the one-joke-only aspect of it, plus the appearance of the kicker line in the chorus makes it feel to me like a song that you might hear if you were one of those guys who takes song pitches in Nashville. Of course it’s the same logical conundrum presented by Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” which means it’s already an idea that’s been done QUITE PROPERLY thank you very much. It sounds to me a little like I was flailing, possibly a bit checked out, busy with other things.

As I recall, the title and the line in the chorus had been with me for a long time, like maybe years. I’m looking around on the blog and in my calendar for that week and can’t find much going on specifically, though likely I was in the midst of PopSci podcasts, preparing to release physical CDs from earlier parts of Thing a Week, and trying to leave time free for all the Summer family stuff that starts to happen this time of year. Just like now in fact (except for the podcasts of course).

I don’t remember (nor do I have good records on) how much money was coming in at this point, but I can tell that it was getting really busy in a lot of areas. There’s a point when first you launch into a bossless existence where you think you’ll never be able to fill up the hours of a day, and early on you don’t. You find stuff to do, and bit by bit it creeps up on you. Eventually you have to start saying No to things because you just don’t have time to do them all, and that’s kind of exciting. Pretty sure that feeling was just arriving for me at this point five years ago. Now I work harder than I ever did when I had a job, and I feel slightly behind and out of control of lots of things at once. On the plus side, I do not have to wear pants.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 35: Soft Rocked By Me

I find this one a bit unsettling. The guy in this song is a total ass – his philosophy is whatever the opposite of carpe diem is. I thought the idea of someone “soft rocking” you was kind of funny when I started this, but now I think it’s just creepy and sad. I’m disgusted with the whole thing.

No bass – no time!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: No bass, no time, no matter! It’s funny, you obsess over every little thing, and then one day you don’t put bass in and it doesn’t really make all that much difference, the world doesn’t end (literally).

The loathing I felt for this character I created certainly comes from my own tendency to avoid seizing the day at any costs - I really don’t like to strive, or make waves. Here’s a story: I had a girlfriend at some grade school age where having a girlfriend means you tell each other that you LIKE each other and then you never speak again (doing it wrong). Her family moved out of town and we got together for one last (first?) hanging out together time at her house after school, and it was chaste and awkward. After she moved she wrote a letter to me saying that she had a new boyfriend and he was awesome! I found out later at some high school reunion that she made it up because she was mad that I didn’t try to kiss her. I’ve always been too busy “respecting” (I think I might mean “fearing”) girls to ever try to make out with them. I’m pretty sure it was this very memory that made me hate this character so much. The passive voice joke though, that’s a winner.

This song has had much more of a life in live shows than it ever did during Thing a Week, and for that I must thank Paul and Storm. It was their idea to cram a semi-improvised medley in the middle, and it’s always an enormously successful set piece when we perform it together. It’s also a great excuse to sing soft rock songs in three part harmony, which is all I ever wanted to do anyway.

I haven’t talked about Paul and Storm much during this reblog thing, but that’s because this was the year I met and got to know them. They contacted me sometime after Baby Got Back and we started doing shows together, and we’ve been friends and frequent collaborators ever since. I learned a great deal from them about many things, especially touring - from the best envelopes to use when you’re sending posters to the cheapest way to book a hotel (Paul is a master of the Priceline bidding mojo). I continue to rely on them for advice for all sorts of things, and to be a little jealous of their energy and never ending string of good ideas. If it was the internet that helped my career get off the ground, it was Paul and Storm who helped me figure out how to bring it out into the real world in front of real audiences. They are consummate showmen, and if you say otherwise I will write a very long blog post explaining my opinion about it. Count on it!

Seriously, don’t wake the dragon (because he is very tired).

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

A few people were offended on my behalf by this comparison. I’m certain that Frannie’s choice of the Snuggie rather than say, a Mini Cooper or an iPhone, was meant to underline the geeky novelty song aspect of my appeal, to which I say: snarkity snark snark! I confess it stings a little. I’m aware that many people think of me as “merely” a guy who writes novelty songs, which is annoying for a couple of reasons. First, writing novelty songs is actually a real thing that you can do, and many talented people have had fine careers doing it, so let’s not go around denigrating it, shall we? Second, it’s a rather lazy and facile way of labeling me that fails to fully describe what I do.

That said, leaving aside the pejorative nature of the comparison, I think it’s accurate in some respects, in that a Snuggie is a new thing that somebody invented and marketed and sold to enormous success. Do you know who else is a Snuggie? Nirvana, Ben Folds, Madonna, and the Grateful Dead. You have to do something new and unique and valuable in order to get anyone’s attention in this business, in fact that’s sort of the point. Just because I did it with “nerds on the Internet” instead of “teenagers in Seattle” or “hippies at ren faires” or “13-year-old girls on YouTube” is incidental, and beside the point. Similarly, Jacob Ganz says in the podcast that I “won the internet lottery,” which is like saying the Beatles won the British Invasion lottery. It’s accurate but unhelpful, because it fails to draw a meaningful distinction between me and anyone else who has had success in this business. It has always been about winning the lottery, and it has always been about being a Snuggie.

The thing that I think most got in the way of what could have been a much more interesting discussion was some confusion about what a business model is. “Writing a song that gets discovered on Slashdot” is not a business model, any more than “putting sleeves on a blanket” is a business model. It is a thing that happened to me, that part is true, but it’s not really much of a strategy. I make songs that are good and then I sell them (and concert tickets, and Tshirts) to the people who want them – that’s my business model, and it’s patently obvious that it’s replicable because I stole it from every other recording artist in the world.

Here are some things I do differently from some other artists: I own all my music 100%, which means I have complete control over how I sell it (or not). I can give it away, I can bundle it on a USB key or in a zip file, I can allow people to make and post music videos, and I don’t have to deal with lawyers or labels to do any of that. I also get all the profits. During Thing a Week I released every single weekly song that I wrote for free, whether they were good or not, without worrying about whether people would buy them (though I hoped they would). I am extremely public about my creative process, hopes and fears, victories and failures. I communicate directly with fans as often as I can without letting it become my full-time job. I’ve never made a music video. I have extremely low overhead. Most of my sales are digital, which means there are almost no distribution costs. I have never spent any money on marketing and rely completely on blogs, podcasts and social networks to spread the word. I tour solo with an acoustic guitar (used to anyway), and I only play in cities where I have already ascertained there is going to be an audience. I record by myself at home (again, used to!) using equipment that is not very expensive, and that I don’t know how to use very well.

My business model is designed especially for me, by me, and it constantly changes and evolves – I’m now working on an album, with a band and a producer, I’m spending money at a real studio, and I will probably spend money on more traditional marketing and radio promotion before I’m through. Nobody, not even me, should try to do exactly what I’ve done, because there are parts of it that won’t make sense for who you are or what you’re interested in. If you’re a band with a lot of people and equipment, you’re going to need a different touring strategy. If you don’t write nerdy songs, you will have to figure out what your version of Slashdot is. If you are Steely Dan, you will not want to record onto a Mac Mini through an SM58. If you hate writing, please don’t set up a blog. Know only this: to do this you need to work extremely hard, make music that is great, and find people to buy it from you. The end.

So is it replicable? Of course it is! For goodness sake, even the Snuggie is replicable. In fact, the Snuggie itself is a replicant of the Slanket, how’s that for a mindblower? (See also the Cudlee, and the German product Doojo, which has gloves.) I can’t believe I have to point this out, but there are plenty of artists making music and using unique and creative promotional techniques to sell it directly to fans (say it with me, won’t you?): Trent Reznor, Radiohead, Amanda Palmer, Paul and Storm, Marian Call, OK Go, MC Frontalot, MC Lars, the list goes on and on and gets larger every day. We are successful to varying degrees and we have different ways of doing things, some of us came from labels, went to labels, or eschewed labels entirely, but we are all participating in the same basic re-jiggering of the spreadsheet. I obviously don’t know the details of everyone’s business, but I’m guessing that we have this one thing in common: we’ve all decided that it’s fine with us if we reach fewer people as long as we reach them more directly. The revolution in the music industry (which has already happened by the way) is one of efficiency, and it means that success is now possible on a much smaller scale. Nobody has to sell out Madison Square Garden anymore to make a living.

And that is the point. That is what’s inarguably different today because of the internet. We now have an entirely new set of contexts and they come with a whole new set of tools that give us cheap and easy access to all of them – niche has gone mainstream. It is no longer necessary to organize your business or your art around geography, or storage space, or capital, or what’s cool in your town, or any other physical constraint. And this is not to say that anyone can become a moderately successful rockstar just by starting a blog – success is still going to be a rare and miraculous thing, as it has always been. There are just a lot more ways to get there than there used to be, and people are finding new ones every day.

I don’t know why the “funny geeky songs” thing seems to distract people so much from this reality during these discussions, but it does. I’ve had a lot of conversations with industry analysts and insiders, and this kind of hand waving and designation of “fluke” is a sadly familiar phenomenon. And it’s a shame, because before we decide if the internet is “good or bad,” there are some really important questions we should try to answer first. I don’t know the answer to any of these, but I sure am curious to find out. How much money is actually being made in this space that never gets tracked as part of the music industry? What percentage of full time professional artists are making a living, and how does that compare to the old record biz? From an economist’s perspective, is filesharing/piracy hurting artists, or just labels (or is it hurting anyone)? How can the people who used to work at labels continue to have careers bringing valuable services to artists now that the landscape has changed? What are the efficiency breakthroughs that we have yet to discover, who’s going to figure out how to profit from this shakeup? How can we rethink antiquated intellectual property laws in a way that continues to “promote the progress of science and useful arts?” And finally, how can I keep my arms warm without putting on a sweater, which is apparently such a huge burden to so many people?

I honestly don’t fault Frannie and Jacob for having negative opinions about me or different opinions about any of these issues. And I’m not trying to ignite a flame war or tear anybody down. I’m simply amazed and disappointed that none of these questions ever came up in a conversation about the internet and the music business, on a podcast, here in the year 2011. It just feels like a huge missed opportunity, and it makes me sad.

Actually, I take it back, they did address that last one didn’t they?

I should know better than to write this sort of post, because it will inevitably come across as a peevish and whiney response to being called a Snuggie. It probably is that to some extent, and I’m already sorry about it. I am really trying to transcend that though, because I think this stuff is so important. I wouldn’t have authorized Alex to reveal the horribly embarrassing revenue number that I can’t even comfortably mention here if I didn’t think that it would, to some extent, move this conversation past the point where people equate “Code Monkey” with “Hamster Dance” and call it a day. I’m disappointed that it did not. And it’s not about my personal ego. OK, maybe it is a little, but I truly believe that the sooner we all acknowledge the internet is not actually killing art, the sooner we can get back to making things that are awesome.

Now is a better time to be a musician, or a fan of music, than any other time in all of human history. Discuss…

Off you go Pig. Wherever you are I hope they have a lot of suitcases to pee in…

Thing a Week 34: Famous Blue Raincoat

This is a cover of a Leonard Cohen song. If some of you kiddies haven’t heard it, you should, and in fact you’re about to. I’m sort of obsessed with it – to me it’s a nearly perfect example of how stories can be told in songs. You never know exactly what happened, but you get glimpses through all these tiny verbal gestures. The title itself says so much without being at all specific. I like to try to fill in the gaps – there’s something about a friend, a wife, and a betrayal, but also something more complicated and private. It’s especially creepy to hear Leonard Cohen sing it, because he is nothing if not totally creepy.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: It’s raining here in Brooklyn, and my very old cat died this weekend, so Leonard Cohen is just about right.

I still feel the same about the greatness of this song, and it will always be in some corner of my brain, waiting expectantly like an unfinished puzzle. These days I think more about how it might have come to Leonard - what he was thinking about when he was writing this, and how much of it might be personal. He hasn’t explained it much. Wikipedia quotes him as saying the raincoat actually belonged to him:

I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the end.

So that clears it up.

I’ve been writing more in this direction for the new album, trying to explain less and evoke more. Trying not to worry too hard about what any song is ABOUT until late in the process. I think there are a couple that will be mysteries to most people, or rather, they’ll assume a different shape for every listener. But they’re all about something. Indeed, I’m starting to think they all might be about the SAME THING.

The scary part, and often the most essential part, is letting pieces of yourself creep into the story. Sometimes there’s a narrow, fuzzy line between the writer of a song and his characters. It can get confusing, because often characters have to do and say and think awful things in order to be interesting. If you write a character that way, is it you thinking that awful thing? Are you really the person saying that, do you secretly feel that way? Well, yes and no. The bits and pieces that grow into a song come from personal experience, they have to. But then you can use them as a guide, strike out in a certain direction, just hang them out there in the wind and see what sticks to them. It’s you, yes, but it’s also your friends and your parents and this character from that book, and that guy’s smile seems to reveal something, and those people look like they have a story to tell, and hey look, ice cream.

I listen to Famous Blue Raincoat and the first thing I want to do is figure out who Leonard Cohen was writing about - who was his friend who did that bad thing! Who was his ladyfriend who had that affair! But then, it’s his raincoat isn’t it? So as directly, painfully personal as this song feels, you just can’t say for sure which parts of it are him. Is he the rake? The cuckold? The woman?

It goes like this: Leonard Cohen was feeling kind of sad one day (maybe his very old cat died) and then he remembered something someone said once when they were making fun of him for wearing the same raincoat all the time. The phrase they used was sarcastic, and maybe a little nasty. It suggested to him a character and a relationship - he’s known people like this, the guy you love and hate, you can’t believe he wears that raincoat all the time, but of course he looks great in it and knows it. He’s dashing and fun and dangerous and kind of a mess, and all the ladies love him. You love him too, but you find him threatening. And as you all grow older, he starts to fray around the edges. Somehow it makes him even more glorious and more pathetic at the same time. As the rest of you settle comfortably into adulthood, he starts to flame out - he makes terrible mistakes, he apologizes, he gets help, he makes more mistakes, have you heard his latest plan to fix everything? You begin to understand that all that stuff that makes him so wonderful to be around comes from a very dark place, and these days he’s just barely keeping it together. One day he goes too far. He disappears for a while. Years later you write him a letter…

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

Thing a Week 33: Tom Cruise Crazy

Poor Tom Cruise. Sure, he’s got plenty of money and fame and power, but the dude is seriously effed up. I’m a fan, I think he’s a pretty pretty fellow and he makes a fine action film. And I’ve really enjoyed watching him freak out in public of late. But there’s something about these superfamous types that I find very sad – the Michael Jacksons, the Madonnas, and now I can’t think of a third one. Which just goes to show, it’s a very exclusive club – there are only a few of these people who get so absorbed by popular culture that they lose the ability to exist on our plane.

Note to Tom Cruise/Scientologist Heavies: please don’t sue me or have me killed.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Victory! This one really had staying power, it’s become an important part of the repertoire even though at the time it wasn’t a huge viral hit or anything. It’s fun to play and fun to sing, and it’s one of those songs that works for almost any audience.

The chord progression and melody of the chorus were floating around in my head for months before it got written, every week it was one of the ideas I would circle back to and try to make work before I would write anything new. This week I either had some success with that technique, or more likely just couldn’t think of anything else and had to push it through. Tom’s Oprah appearance was in May of 2005, and that was the beginning of a string of stuff with him and Katie Holmes and a thing with Brooke Shields about anti-depressants and just general wackadoodle business. It was on my mind, and it’s possible I was also thinking about fame in relation to my own newly chosen career.

I really do feel bad for Tom Cruise. I’m a little more well acquainted with how it feels to be famous (kinda sorta) than I was, and I have to say, it does feel pretty weird sometimes. I always love making a connection with people through the music or through a performance, that’s not what I’m talking about. The strange part is the other stuff, the stuff that’s not connected with the things I make and do - and I get very little of this, but it amounts to “Look, there’s that guy.”

There’s an aspect of fame that is mostly about scarcity. You might want to have your picture taken next to the Eiffel Tower for the same reason you might want to have your picture taken next to Tom Cruise: because it marks the moment that you were there in that unique place. This is less a factor for me, because I’m not famous enough to be famous just for being famous. But when it does happen, I can feel it breaking my connection with myself for a second. The interaction between object of fame and admirer of fame has very little humanity in it - in both directions, I know, I’ve made an ass of myself many times in front of famous people. It just makes everyone crazy for a little while. While the non famous (or less famous) person is trying to mark the moment, or say something important, or in some way take advantage of this rare opportunity, the famous (or more famous) person is trying to act the way they’re supposed to act, trying to live up to what they’re supposed to be, trying to live up to the moment that is so important for this other person. And meanwhile they might be tired, sad, unshowered, in the middle of an argument, constipated, whatever. It’s not a real interaction between people, it’s some other kind of bizarre transaction, and our hearts are not built for it.

I never feel famous inside my head, and so when people treat me like a famous person, it creates a little tear in the fabric of reality. That tear is easily repaired by spending time as just me, hanging out with friends or family who know me as Jonathan. But I can imagine that if enough of those tears happened over a short enough span of time, you might not easily be able to come back from it. And what happens when even your private time gets corrupted? When you can’t go to the grocery store without people trying to take pictures of you and sell them to magazines? When you start to suspect even your friends are treating you differently, maybe even start to wonder if they are even your friends? And what if there’s a pseudo scientific system/religion/cult that blames all of your disconnectedness and failing relationships on the spirits of ancient aliens who are living inside your body? Does that make any less sense than the fact that complete strangers are hiding in bushes outside your home with cameras, going through your garbage, speculating on your sexuality, and wondering if you are really in love with your wife or just pretending to be? That would be weird, right?

I recognize this is a first world problem. And I’m not complaining - I love my job, SO MUCH, and I’m not trying to make you feel bad about having your picture taken with me. I am grateful for (and henceforth forever in desperate need of) your attention. I do my best to always stay grounded, appropriately thankful, and as real as I can be given the circumstances. But it’s not always easy even at my meager level of fame, and I simply cannot imagine how it must be for Tom and people like him (I call him Tom, we’re pals because we’re both famous).

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

It’s all happening! I’ve bought my flights and everything. Tickets should now be on sale for all these shows – there was some confusion about the London show, but it is NOT sold out and it has NOT moved to Dingwall’s. I can already taste that delicious brown sauce…

Harbourside, Bristol, UK – Colston Hall
Thursday June 9 at 8 PM
Tickets: bit.ly/hGxE6i
Acoustic show with Paul and Storm

Manchester, UK – Manchester Academy 3
Friday June 10 at 7:30 PM
Tickets: bit.ly/hJMnsr
Acoustic show with Paul and Storm

London, UK – Union Chapel
Saturday June 11 at 7 PM
Tickets: bit.ly/kgg5uY
Acoustic show with Paul and Storm

Amsterdam, NL – Melkweg (Oude Zaal)
Monday June 13 at 8:30 PM
Tickets: bit.ly/mrJFUz
Acoustic show with Paul and Storm

Thing a Week 32: Till the Money Comes

Just so you know how bad this monkey problem of mine has gotten, every time I type the title of this song my fingers want to type “Monkey” instead of “Money,” which would make for a very different song. This is more on the theme of “asshole sings a breakup song,” in this case his assholism is that he is a scrub, the kind of guy who can’t get no love from the lovely ladies of TLC.

I should also mention, by popular request I have made available a huge honking box set – it’s at the top of the songs page, it costs $50, and it gives you everything but the current Thing a Week album in one big zipfile. If you’ve been waiting to jump in and purchase, this may be the place to do it…

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This is one of those songs that I basically haven’t thought about since the day I posted it, nor do I really remember writing it. I was just now surprised by the lyrics in the 3rd verse, which I could swear I’ve never heard before. Also: hey, this one has a bridge? Obviously it’s not one of my favorites. I do like the backing vocals in the chorus, though I sure wish I had resisted ending the chorus on that m7b5 chord, which you JoCo scholars will recognize as JoCo Harmonic Crutch #217. As a concept it’s OK, but I feel like it didn’t quite come together enough to transcend the jokes and become something else - think about Skullcrusher Mountain, funny, but there’s a lot more going on in that song. Here I think the concept gets you to the jokes and then leaves you there with not enough change in your pocket to take the bus home.

I also would like to complain about the arrangement (do NOT like the percussion loop and the way it fails to work with the croony acoustic vibe) and the mix (muddy! should have sharpened those chorus vocals a little) and the form (that bridge was a terrible idea, I can tell I was tacking it on to add something, anything, to what is just kind of a dull song all around). This song feels like part of the calm before the storm - we’re just a few weeks away from where it started to get really interesting.

This is exactly the kind of song you need to write and then LEAVE OFF THE ALBUM. Of course I didn’t have that luxury given my Thing a Week concept, which was just to release everything in chronological order, in its current state of completion, and regardless of quality. In that way the whole Thing a Week collection is less an album and more an archive of my creative process that year, which is interesting, but a very different beast.

I guess I really haven’t done a proper album since Smoking Monkey in 2001 (or something). The one that I’m working on now feels in many ways like my first album ever, which is weird given the fact that I’ve been doing this professionally for six years. I have to say I’m enjoying it quite a bit. In contrast to TAW, it’s all about diving deep, spending LOTS of time working on a song until it’s everything it can be. There are quite a few songs that you will never hear, because they are not good enough in my opinion. But it’s a great pleasure to not have to compromise based on how much time I have before Friday, whether or not I can play the banjo, etc. While I think there’s great value in something like TAW where you just go and go and never look back, it doesn’t leave any space for any consistency of vision. As I’m stepping back now at the end of this album process I’m finding that the whole of it is taking a shape, and telling a larger story. It actually seems to be “about” something, and that’s very exciting.

On the business and career front, this was the week when the PopSci Podcast launched - great fun to do, but I very quickly ran out of time to do it. I also started selling the Box Set of mp3s, which was the entire collection for $50. That’s been a really important part of the business, it’s a great deal and it gets people to listen to LOTS of stuff (even bad songs like this one, oy). Spiff’s WoW videos were starting to pop up on YouTube, and in general it seems like things were really buzzing out there. I’m almost certain that Code Monkey was the catalyst for this particular bump - all the little bits and pieces of my career were out there in a trail of breadcrumbs, and Code Monkey was the flashing neon sign at the trailhead.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

I’m getting lots of questions on Twitter and in emails, so this is an attempt to answer some of them in one fell swoop. Ready?

Can I buy this song anywhere?
Not as of this writing, and I don’t know when you will be able to. The song and the recording are owned by Valve, so I’m not at all involved with what happens to it next. I happen to know that they’re planning on putting out a sound track, more than likely it will be on iTunes and Amazon and other places just like the sound track for the first Portal. But I don’t know when that will be – I’ve heard them say “soon.”

What about Rock Band? A karaoke version? Source tracks for remixes?
See above – not up to me. I hope that Valve will do all these things though.

This is under Creative Commons like all your other stuff right? So I cover this song? Create a parody? Make a video?
It is not under Creative Commons. Technically you would have to get permission from Valve to do something with it. In the past they’ve not seemed to mind all the crazy things people did with Still Alive, so if I had to guess (and I do), I would say that as long as you weren’t profiting from it in some way, they’d generally be supportive of fan-created stuff. But this is not legal advice, and I certainly can’t give you (or refuse you) permission to do anything.

Are you going to release your own version with you singing, the way you did with Still Alive?
I might. In fact I have permission to do that from Valve. I’m not yet sure what form that would take – the new song is so much more dependent on the arrangement and all the electronics that I haven’t quite figured out another way to make it work. But you’ll be sure to know when that happens, because I will tell you. I am finishing up a new recording of Still Alive that I did in the studio with the new band, with guest vocalist Sara Quin from Tegan and Sara, keyboards from Loser’s Lounge superstar Joe McGinty, and professional thereminista Dorit Chrysler. That version will go on the new album, I don’t know yet if there will also be a version of the Portal 2 song.

Are you going to play this song live at shows?
Eventually. For now I think it’s a little too close to when the game was released. It’s debatable whether or not the song contains actual spoilers, but it is certainly true that hearing it outside the context of the game will be a different experience. So I want to make sure I’ve given people plenty of time to buy and play the game before I start forcing it on them at shows. I don’t know exactly when that will be, sort of going to play it by ear.

Did you play the game before you wrote the song?
No, they created the game based on a song I made up based on nothing. <–joke. Yes of course! I spoke at great length with the writers as they were finishing things up, and I had an early version of the game that I was able to play through. I thought a lot about GlaDOS and her new experiences, what she was experiencing in this story, and there is a lot of new stuff that comes to light. Much later when it is less spoilery I can talk with more specificity about what things mean and what I think is going on in her head. But certainly I tried very hard to hit the moving target that was the story of the game, and a big part of that was playing it – it’s really the only way to know how the player is going to feel by the end, what they’ll know, what they’ll expect, what will make them go aha!

Did you write any other music for the game?
No. The song that plays through that radio you find is by The National, all the great turret stuff is by Valve composer Mike Morasky.

How did you make this recording?
I wrote it on guitar, made some scratch tracks of synths and drums and things, sort of worked it out from there. The opening musical idea was inspired by a drum loop that Flansburgh sent me, part of a giant “inspiration pack” of drum loops to help kick start some songwriting for my album. It just seemed to fit what I was doing with the Portal song, so I tweaked it and stuffed it in. I took a demo version with my scratch vocal to Valve to go into a studio there and record Ellen McLain singing it. We did the processing of her voice back in the Valve offices. I took that track and all my instrument tracks back to the NYC studio where I had been working on my album, and John Flansburgh and Pat Dillett and I messed with the arrangement. So really it’s the same producer (Flansburgh) and sound engineer (Dillett) team I’ve been working with on the new album. We took out a track here and there, changed a sound here and there, mixed, EQ’d. It was Flansburgh’s idea to drop out the instruments on “Oh, did you think I meant you?” which still gives me shivers.

I think that’s most of the main questions, but I’ll update here if I come across more. Thanks for all the positive feedback everyone, I feel very lucky to once again be involved with something as wonderful as Portal 2.

Thing a Week 31: Just as Long as Me

I wrote this song for a documentary a friend is working on about being tall (and in case he is reading this: yes, I certainly do owe him a phone call). Some people fake the funk, me, I fake the bluegrass. And this feller in this song, you see, he’s extremely tall and he would like to find a tall woman. I like the vocals and I’m pretty proud of the word play in the chorus, but I think this song could be much improved by the addition of a little fiddle – any bluegrass fiddle players out there?

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: It would be interesting to track the “day late and dollar short” index of the songs week to week from the original Thing a Week against the same measurement for these Redux posts. I am late a lot! It’s touring that does it to me. Short bursts of travel preceded by a stretch of planning and followed by a period of recovery and catching up. It amounts to a black hole, a dark, timeless void where I cease to exist - I become merely a shadow that smells like an airplane and only wants to fall asleep in front of the hotel television. In case it isn’t clear (it isn’t), this post was meant to happen 6 days ago, so if I want to get back on schedule I will post again tomorrow. Blargh.

ANYWAY. This last week (that is to say, last Friday’s “this last week”) was when Hodgman’s Apple ads started running. I thought I was becoming famous, but what happened to John as a result of these ads was another thing entirely: TV famous, very different from Internet famous. It was thrilling to watch, and I was very happy for my friend. Did I really call Justin Long “the guy from Jeepers Creepers 2”? Yes, I did.

Those were heady days! Code Monkey Tshirts first went on sale this week at CafePress, the beginning of my merchandise empire. MySpace was still a thing. And I, well, I failed to write a new song. Just as Long as Me was from the reserve tank, I think that I may have added a verse and tweaked a lyric or two, but it was mostly a repurposing of something I had already made. No excuse this time. Maybe too busy, er, watching Apple ads? Dunno.

I would later acquire a fiddle part from some kind internet person - I can’t locate that post right now and am too lazy to keep looking. It helped a lot with the bluegrass flavor. You may be wondering if I play the banjo this quickly. The answer is yes, for short stretches of time, like Wile E. Coyote running in the air right before he falls off the cliff. Thanks to digital editing capabilities, it almost sounds like a guy playing the banjo.

The song is a little too gimmicky for my taste now, I’m not as interested in writing these kinds of songs as I once was. There are some good jokes in there though. And YE GODS do I love three part bluegrass harmony, I don’t know why exactly. It’s like, the way my brain is wired, bluegrass harmonies are a direct line to the very center of pure musical beauty to me. Sometimes just the sound of it makes me tear up. Probably a tumor.

I also wrote an Al Jolson style number about being tall for the same documentary, and likely I used the same jokes there too. And the same banjo. Not sure if he ever finished that thing, I should ask…

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.