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Jonathan Coulton, a Day in the Life

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the code-monkey-still-the-best dept.

The New York Times is running a look behind the scenes with singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton, creator the somewhat popular "Thing a week" songs on his blog. Coulton describes a bit of how he got started and what daily life is like maintaining relations with his fans. "Along the way, he discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the "you rock!" variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton's love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he's now feeling guilty about being rude."

4 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Who?

  2. 100 messages a day? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    No one in the history of time has ever received that many emails a day.

    1. Re:100 messages a day? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      No one in the history of time has ever received that many emails a day.
      No normal human could respond sincerely to 100 angsty emails a day. Mr. Coulton has superpowers, his secret identity is Respondo. In addition to the ability and desire to write thoughtful responses to 100 emails daily, Respondo is also known to have the powers of BCC:-seeing, and complete mastery of reply-all-fu. Respondo has been having trouble with his love life due to his archrival, Dr. V1agra, who always rises to the challenge. Respondo is currently engaged in a battle of wills against Blogspammer and his evil minion, Formula409.

      Seriously, though (well, not really), we'd all do well to not troll Slashdot's human interest stories as much as any news outlet.
  3. 100 a day? by magarity · · Score: 5, Funny

    Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he's now feeling guilty about being rude."
     
    And now you've gone and slashdotted the poor fellow. Here come his 15 minutes and there goes all his prexisting fan base.