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Jonathan Coulton, a Day in the Life
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."
Personally, I like re: Your Brains better and the WoW version of Code Monkey as well.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
All on one page, no ads:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13audi
Coulton's success isn't just a "right place at the right time" sort of thing, either... his music is actually very good. The lyrics are witty and original, the progressions are more than just I-IV-V-I, and his tracks are extremely well-produced. My favorites include "Bacteria" (which uses a KFC training tape as the source material), "That Spells DNA," "Ikea," "Shop Vac," "Creepy Doll," "Under the Pines," many of which are geeky and most of which are funny. But he very often churns out more serious stuff: "When You Go," "Drinking With You," a cover of Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat," and "I'm Your Moon," a song sung by Charon to Pluto reassuring the newly-christened dwarf planet that it's still the most important thing in Charon's life. (Okay, that one is geeky, too, but just you try listening to it without getting a little lump in your throat.)
The article doesn't mention (I guess it's a little off-topic) that Coulton also serves as Popular Science's "Contributing Troubadour" and is good friends with John Hodgman.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.