Reply To: A Talk with JoCo, part 1 (Early Years)
I’m not sure JoCo “discovered his voice and personae” with LGB. It may have helped him refine it and see what the audience likes and doesn’t but he definitely had his sound before them. We can see this by looking at smoking monkey which was written before the LGB. The songs in that album are still of the same sort of style. I think it just let JoCo get more confident that other poeple thought his sound was good not just him and his small circle of friends. It was a stepping stone.
I wanted to reply to this a couple days ago but realized that you hadn’t heard the part of the interview I wanted to reference, and rather than, y’know, release everything ahead of schedule I opted to wait and reply after everyone had run out of things to say.~
Sound-wise, “Smoking Monkey” isn’t drastically different from the rest of the JoCoeuvre, certainly. But as we brought up in part 4, “Smoking Monkey” doesn’t really explore the “geeky” side that really starts coming out later on. I mean, look at WTMT: The Future Soon, Skullcrusher, I Crush Everything, Betty and Me, and Mandelbrot Set. Obviously, as we found out in this part, that was a collection specifically intended to be sold at Pop!Tech, and so it’s intentionally geekier, but still — most of those songs (as we found in Part 2) came out of LGB.
I admit I don’t know much about either of their personalities before LGB, but can we say that emceeing the lectures helped Hodgman become comfortable as a “straitlaced expert” and writing songs for the lectures helped Coulton grow comfortable with “geeky” subject matter? (Not to mention the surface-level ways in which the lectures pushed them into these opportunities — oh, wait, part of my next sentence comes out in Part 5, which I should better get to uploading!)