Jonathan Coulton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources.
This article has been tagged since February 2007.
Jonathan Coulton

Background information
Born 12/1
Genre(s) Folk rock
Occupation(s) singer-songwriter
Website http://www.jonathancoulton.com/

Jonathan Coulton is a folk rock singer-songwriter. He was first featured singing "Midnight Train to Georgia" with the Yale Whiffenpoofs. He is now the Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science as well as the Musical Director for The Little Gray Book Lectures. Coulton is best known for his light-acoustic cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot hit song "Baby Got Back" and an original piece entitled "Code Monkey." A video set to his song "Re: your brains" was a featured link on Good Morning Silicon Valley. His work has also been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered."

He is the author of a 5-song set called Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms that was commissioned for the September 2005 issue of Popular Science. His most recent work at Popular Science is on a podcast for the magazine, entitled the PopSci Podcast.

Coulton accompanied John Hodgman on his list of 700 Hobo Names promotional track for The Areas of My Expertise as the guitarist (he was referenced as "Jonathan William Coulton, the Colchester Kid" in said work). Coulton has also been referenced in Hodgman's work with The Daily Show; a Jonathan Coulton of Colchester, Connecticut is Hodgman's pick to win an essay contest on defeating the Iraqi insurgency [1]. The winning entry, as set to music, was then played on the program; this song, about dropping snakes from airplanes, was written and performed by Coulton.

Most of Coulton's songs focus on intellectual, "geeky" topics such as a man who is "de-evolving" into a monkey, a strange loner who dreams of destroying the world and who gives half-monkey, half-pony monsters to his girlfriend, and the dangers of bacteria. They generally feature Coulton's characteristic crooning vocals accompanied by guitar, drums, and occasionally the accordion, harmonica, mandolin, or glockenspiel.

Contents

[edit] Discography

For Jonathan Coulton's full discography, including tracklistings, see Jonathan Coulton discography.

  • Smoking Monkey
  • Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
  • Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms
  • Thing a Week One
  • Thing a Week Two
  • Thing a Week Three
  • Thing a Week Four

Many of Coulton's songs are published on his website [1] as MP3 downloads. Many of them are free. All of his original songs fall under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Coulton also releases other songs under "The Little Gray Book Lectures."

He received a good deal of attention for his October 14, 2005 light-acoustic cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot hit song Baby Got Back. Additionally, one of his Thing a Week tracks, Code Monkey, was featured on Slashdot [2] on April 23, 2006 as well as linked from the multi-million reader webcomic Penny-Arcade [3].

[edit] Secondary Creativity

A notable aspect of Coulton's pioneering approach to being an internet-based professional performing artist is the manner in which he has engaged a small but loyal group of fans who actively participate in promoting him. Since Jonathan Coulton uses Creative Commons for licensing, others are free to use his songs in their own works. As a result, a number of music videos have been created using his songs. Machinima such as the ILL Clan's video for "Code Monkey," Mike "Spiff" Booth's videos for Re: Your Brains and Just As Long As Me are created using computer generated graphics from games such as World of Warcraft or The Movies. There are also videos in the style of Coulton's Flickr [2] which use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr as a slideshow accompaniment to the song. The Jonathan Coulton Project [3] (also known as JoCoPro) has created a number of these.

Jonathan Coulton's "A Talk With George" [4] was the winner of the Plimpton Project's [5] song contest.

[edit] Thing a Week

"Thing a Week" is the name that Coulton gave to a creative experiment which ran from 16 September 2005 to 30 September 2006. In this project, Coulton undertook to release 52 original musical pieces in the course of a year, one each week. This target was achieved. 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. Early indications are that the experiment succeeded in generating a large number of high quality songs, boosting sales of music downloads, expanding Coulton's public presence and enlarging his fan base. The success of the financial objective is more difficult to judge, but Coulton was quoted in a September 2006 interview as stating that "in some parts of the country, I’d be making a decent living". [4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Daily Show: Hodgman - Essay Contest (HTML/Windows Media Player 9). Comedy Central (2006-04-25). Retrieved on 2007-02-19.
  2. ^ Code Monkey Like Fritos (HTML). slashdot.com (2006-04-23). Retrieved on 2007-02-19.
  3. ^ Prinny Please (HTML). www.penny-arcade.com (2006-09-03). Retrieved on 2007-02-19.
  4. ^ Quick Stop Interview: Jonathan Coulton (HTML). View Askew Productions (2006-09-28). Retrieved on 2007-02-19.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../j/o/n/Jonathan_Coulton_f9f5.html"