Thing a Week

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"Thing a Week" is the name that Jonathan Coulton gave to a creative experiment which ran from September 16, 2005 (See You All in Hell) to September 30, 2006 (We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions).

When he quit his day job to pursue music full-time, one of his former co-workers suggested that he release a song each week for a year. The objectives were:

  • (a) to push the artist's creative envelope by adopting what Coulton describes as a "forced-march approach to writing and recording";
  • (b) to prove to himself that he was capable of producing creative output to a deadline; and
  • (c) to test the viability of the internet and Creative Commons as a platform capable of supporting a professional artist financially.

The resulting 52 tracks included many original songs, some covers, one mash-up, and a few songs based largely or entirely on sampled or synthesized vocals. Some of the original songs had a previous history, having been performed or recorded earlier, but many were truly novel works. Fifty-one of the tracks (excepting the mash-up, for legal reasons) were collected in a series of four seasonally-themed CDs which are available singly or as a boxed set.

Thing a Week Redux[edit]

In September of 2010, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Thing a Week project, Coulton began to "re-run Thing a Week in real time," posting the songs, original blog post and new commentary on a dedicated blog, Thing a Week Redux. Each new post appears on Friday, the release day for the original project, making them one day after the actual fifth anniversary of the original posts. The first two songs were (re-)posted on the correct dates before Coulton mentioned Thing a Week Redux on his blog.