Jonathan Coulton recently played the Guthrie Theater with frequent traveling companions Paul and Storm. As the crowd gathered before the show, it quickly became apparent that this was the most incredible cross-section of Twin Cities geeks and nerds outside CONvergence, the annual science fiction convention held every July in Bloomington (not surprisingly, Paul and Storm will also be playing that event).
Paul and Storm are, arguably, both the best and worst openers an artist could hope for. They had the audience rolling in the aisles and continually delaying the end of the set until Paul and Storm quite literally begged for the chance to finish their set so Jonathan Coulton could begin his show before sunrise.
After the intense belly laughs of the opening set, Jonathan Coulton certainly changed the pace. For audience members who were primarily familiar with "RE: Your Brains" and "First of May" before the show, they were almost certainly surprised and perhaps slightly disappointed. Mr. Coulton showed his slow, more thoughtful - although no less geeky - side. A highlight was "Space Doggity," both an ode to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and a tribute to the first living creature in space. It was beautifully played and surprisingly touching - but not laugh-out-loud funny.
There was also numerous requests for "Bus Plunge," an in-joke from a previous Twin Cities show that perhaps half the audience was in on. The request wasn't granted, but you can check out the video from that past show in the sidebar.
It was, overall, a great show - the more serious side of Jonathan Coulton can be surprising after his comedic internet noteriety, but it's well-done and in combination with his impressive technical mastery of the guitar (something that can be rare in "comedy" shows), not at all disappointing.
I was able to get a chance to sit down with Mr. Coulton in the weeks leading up to the show - please continue on for the transcript of the interview (or you can listen to the audio here).
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Michelle: One of the more common ways that people come across your work is your thing-a-week project, even though that’s quite a ways in the past now. Tell us a little bit about it and why you decided to do it.
JoCo: In 2005, I quit my day job as a software designer in order to pursue music full time. I had enormous amounts of time stretching out in front of me once I was not working and it seemed like a good idea to give myself a little project to work, to make sure that I was writing music and not just sitting around playing video games. I basically promised the internet I would put out a new song every Friday. In doing that, I felt like it was an important enough deadline that I would be forced to actually meet it. I ended up doing that for a whole year. And it was put out on CDs in whatever state of quality or completion it was.
Michelle: Has that changed how you approach your work after the project? I know you don’t write one song a week, but did it change your process?
JoCo: It changed what I know about how things work in my head when I’m writing. I learned a lot about how to write songs. Any time you work on something consistently like that, you’re going to enhance your vocabulary and add stuff to your bag of tricks. It certainly did not make songwriting any easier for me. You would think that doing it 52 times in a row, it would be easy the 53rd time you did it, but it just doesn’t work that way. It’s still just as hard as it was, it’s just that now I have a little bit more faith in the process than I used to.
Michelle: That makes sense. Did you have a lot of people holding you to that internet promise at first?
JoCo: Well, no – nobody was really holding me to it. But you don’t want to be the guy who says, “I’m going to do this!” and then you don’t do it. Then you have to write a follow-up blog post that says, “Hey, I decided not to do this after all…” I mean, it’s the internet. It lasts forever. You don’t want to let yourself down.
Michelle: As someone who has started a couple of internet projects that have ended up not working out, I really admire that.
JoCo: *laughter*
Michelle: What kind of video games do you play when you waste time? Not that you would ever do such a thing.
JoCo: No, of course not. I used to be a big console gamer, but I have two kids now. Between that and all the traveling I do, I only have small segments of time to myself these days. And so I tend to do a lot of iPhone gaming, because I can turn it on and off without thinking about it. While I love to get involved in game play that takes 40 hours and where you go through a whole story, I just don’t have the time to do that anymore. I’ll move little blocks around a screen for five minutes and that counts as gaming for me.
Michelle: Have you gotten addicted to Angry Birds yet?
JoCo: Oh sure – I’ve been infected with Angry Birds and now cured.
Michelle: I know that you are currently working on a new record. Do you feel a lot of pressure to write songs that are funny or geeky or about zombies, or do you feel free when you approach songwriting?
JoCo: *laughter* I don’t know if anybody feels free when they approach songwriting. I think all creative people are in shackles of their own design. I certainly do feel pressured to write funny stuff or nerdy stuff. The truth is, I am probably most well-known for the geeky stuff and the funny stuff, but that actually is a relatively small percentage of my output. I have always done many different kinds of things. If it were up to me, what I write about – I cast around for ideas and if I get a good one, that’s the one I use. It’s not like I have the luxury of choosing between ten songs that I could write and I pick the one that I like best. It’s really the only one that works at the time, so I go with it.
Michelle: Do you have any non-musical inspiration when you write music?
JoCo: I think I take a lot of inspiration from science fiction – not anything in particular, but that kind of storytelling, where you are revealing something about something other than the subject of your story. Science fiction is great in that way – all fiction does, I suppose – but science fiction is particularly good at letting you explore a bunch of characters and see what happens in a story, but then also on another level be thinking about your own life and your own world. That kind of storytelling is something that I aspire to a lot of the time.
Michelle: You’re doing show with a band now – not all your shows, but some?
JoCo: Yeah, I’m trying to figure it out. It’s a new thing. The album is being produced by John Flansburgh [They Might Be Giants]. He was like, “Oh – you’ve got to play an electric guitar in a band,” and I was like, “Oh, hmm – that’s sounds scary.” But it turns out that it’s really fun. Everybody is right – it’s really awesome to play in a rock band. I’ve always conceived of the stuff I write as full-fledged band arrangements for the most part, so it’s nice to have a bunch of people who can make that happen. I’m still trying to figure it out – I’ve been touring, writing and recording by myself for so long that I’ve gotten really good at that, so I’m trying to figure out how to get better at this. It really does change the game in a lot of ways. I’m experimenting with a few things – I do band shows when I can and solo shows here and there. I don’t know – we’ll see what happens.
Michelle: Do you have a favorite song that you like to perform live?
JoCo: No – it’s impossible to pick a favorite. It depends on the night, it depends on what works. I tend to like the slow, sad ones the best, but those are always the favorites of the crowd.
Michelle: There was a period of time – say, back in January – when my Twitter feed was completely dominated the JoCo Cruise. It was as though every other tweet as about the cruise and it looked like a really good time. Being in Minnesota, it made me very sad to not be there. Where did you get that idea?
JoCo: There have been a number of bands that have been doing fan cruises for a few years.
Michelle: Like Boyz II Men.
JoCo: Like Boyz II Men? Sure.
Michelle: Yeah, they had a big reunion, renew your wedding vows cruise in February. I’m ashamed that I know that.
JoCo: Sounds awesome. It was my booking agent’s idea to actually investigate doing it. I’m really glad we did because it was such a blast. It was another terrifying thing, to set up all this stuff and try to get people to come – I was worried that it was going to fail in any number of ways, but it really exceeded my expectations. It was a great deal of fun and it was really nice hanging out with a bunch of fans. They were just so fantastic and they had such energy and excitement about it. They really made the thing happen – they really made it lift off in a way that I could not have done on my own. That was a blast. We hope to do another one soon [and they are! More information here.]
Michelle: I know that because of how you share your music on the internet, you get a lot of fan creations based on your songs. Have you ever seen anything that just really blew you away?
JoCo: Yeah, recently somebody sent me a video they made for a song called “Shop Vac” and it’s a kinetic typography video, which sounds kind of dull, I suppose, but it’s just fantastic. He clearly spent a long time working on it. I can’t even describe it – it’s on YouTube and people should look for it [it’s also embedded into the left-hand sidebar of this article]. It really is powerful stuff. It helps you to experience the song on another level, which is what any good music video does.
Michelle: I’ve seen DVDs of your live shows, with people in costume, dressed as zombies – what’s the most surprising thing an audience has thrown at you?
JoCo: *laughter* I think it’s surprising any time an audience throws something at you.
Michelle: Well, maybe not literally.
JoCo: You know, there have been times when zombies have actually rushed the stage during the zombie song. That’s always a little unsettling. It’s weird enough to have an entire crowd of people screaming at you like a bunch of zombies, but it’s another thing for them to actually break through the fourth wall and join you on stage. So far I have not been stabbed, for which I am grateful.
Michelle: Hopefully that can continue.
JoCo: Fingers crossed.
Michelle: Do you get a lot of weird audience requests?
JoCo: No, not really. People ask for certain songs and I try to play them when I can [unless you ask for “Bus Plunge.” That one, Mr. Coulton has no desire to revisit]. I get a lot of requests for shout outs – you know, “Can you give my friend Roger a shout out? It’s his birthday.” I always have to explain, if I did all the shout outs, it would just become the Jonathan Coulton Shout Out Show and that wouldn’t be very much fun for anybody.
Michelle: Except for the person in those three seconds when they got a shout out.
JoCo: Except for that person, exactly.
Michelle: I cover live music here in the Twin Cities, so I always like to ask musicians what’s the best live show they’ve ever seen?
JoCo: Hmm. The best live show I’ve ever seen.
Michelle: Just off the top of your head – obviously it’s hard to just pick one.
JoCo: I recently saw The Presidents of the United States of America play in Seattle as part of their annual Presidents’ Day weekend fest. It was definitely their crowd – it was solidly their crowd. It was a sold out show at this venue in Seattle. I had never seen them before, but they just put on the greatest show. It was really a master class in fun. I’ve had to work very hard at not just standing there and staring at my feet the whole time I’m playing, so to see these guys up there, jumping around and having such a great time – it was like, “Yeah, that’s how you do it.”
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