Music Monday: Jonathan Coulton

The bard of geekdom, the songwriter of record for games and nerdery, with a career born on the internet and an annual cruise. That is Jonathan Coulton, and this is Music Monday.

I think I first heard about Jonathan Coulton because he was a collaborator on the audiobook version of John Hodgman's The Areas Of My Expertise, Hodgman's first of three books of fake world knowledge. This was about the time when he was doing his year long "Thing A Week" project, in which he released 1 song per week, for free, online.

But before we get to that, there was the first album, Smoking Monkey, and the first EP, Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow. Those were released before Coulton became a full time musician, and the latter contains some of my favorites of his songs. While funny, those songs all seem to be the product of a man stuck in a bad place.

The Future Soon is the song of young man dreaming of a better future. A better future in which he is an evil overlord.

Skullcrusher Mountain is the... logical? next step, the song of an actual supervillain.

Finally, what may be Coulton's saddest song ever, the song of a giant squid that just wants to make friends, but is too big and strong. It's called I Crush Everything.

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Now back to "Thing A Week," and the time I first discovered Coulton's work.

When you release one song every week, not every single one is going to be a winner, but there were great songs from the very start. The fourth Thing A Week song was this one:

Shop Vac was another demonstration of Coulton's penchant for pairing upbeat music to dark and funny lyrics. This song of suburban ennui and despair is still catchy af.

Also in the first group of songs that would be collected in the album Thing A Week 1 is Coulton's first famous cover, in which he does one of my favorite things: He zags when you think he'll zig. Because the song he chose to cover, with his own lovely melody building on the original, is Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back:

If you're fans of Glee, you may have heard a similar version, as the show stole Coulton's arrangement without compensation.

Thing A Week 2 contains two of my all time favorite Coulton songs, both of which were in regular rotation back when I used to run a monthly bar night for nerds called Geekdom in Tel Aviv. The first is Chiron Beta Prime.

It's funny, and also suuuuper dark. But don't worry, friends! Things get WAY darker with the next one, the Geekdom anthem, and a real sing-along sensation: Re: Your Brains

This song, in which Coulton mashes up the corporate culture he had only recently escaped (more on that a bit later) with a zombie story features your very worst co-worker as a zombie, trying to convince you to open the door. He even offers a compromise: If you open up the door, we'll all come inside and eat your brains! Yeah, dark. But funny! But dark!

The highlight of Thing A Week 3 is one of Coulton's most personal songs, as it is directly related to that corporate world I mentioned. Before becoming a full time musician, Coulton was a programmer, and he put some of that personal experience into another of his best known songs, Code Monkey.

Thing A Week 4 concluded the experiment, and had one of my favorite Coulton song, the legitimately scary Creepy Doll.

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Thing A Week made Coulton famous among a very specific subset of nerds. His next song, however, would make him famous among a much larger group of nerds. You see, Coulton was hired by Valve to write the ending song to a little game that was a free addition to their Orange Box package. That game was Portal, and that song was Still Alive.

Portal was, and remains, one of the greatest games of all time. The innovative gameplay paired beautifully with the incredibly sharp writing to create a bona fide masterpiece. And Coulton's song, as sung by Ellen McClain doing her GLaDOS voice, was a perfect ending.

There are many, many, many cover versions of this song. I'll show restraint and only share one, in which Coulton collaborates with Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara:

Portal was followed by Portal 2, which was also a great game and also ended with a Jonathan Coulton song sung by Ellen McClain, Want You Gone:

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2011 was a pretty big year for Coulton, as he released his first full post-Thing album, Artificial Heart and also hosted the first of his annual cruises. Originally called JoCo Cruise Crazy, and now with the much less ableist name JoCo Cruise, what started as a group within a cruiseship has become an entire cruise with fans, musicians, comedians, podcasters, authors. It is most definitely on my bucket list.

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But let's get back to the album. It's great! Picking three songs from Artificial Heart is not easy for me, but here we go. Let's start with Nemeses (which is how that word is said, Evil Trio from Buffy)

Next up, Sticking It To Myself.

And, finally, probably my favorite song of the album, a song of a newscaster having a breakdown in Good Morning Tuscon.

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As I am less familiar with Coulton's latest album, last year's Solid State, I'll end with two songs that were not released as part of an album, and are both great. The first was written for Coulton's friend John Scalzi's novel Redshirts, and is the official theme of the novel:

The second is, to me, a great illustration of Coulton's growth from the early songs of lonelyness and nerdy manliness. It is my very favorite Coulton's song, and even had a children's book based on it successfully crowdfunded. I already shared it here recently, but I'll happily share it all day every day. It's The Princess Who Saved Herself:

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Much like last week, I've got a playlist of Coulton's music playing on the Deskflip and Chill discord server. Come on by!

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