This week’s music post is about Jonathan Coulton. Coulton is a 30-something, Brooklyn-based, singer/songwriter. Add those three labels together and they equal “smart and cheeky hipster musician”. I already had him in mind for a future music post, but when the New York Times profiled him this week, it pushed his name to the top of the pile.

In September 2005, Coulton quit his job as a computer programmer and became a full-time singer and songwriter. To jumpstart his already budding career, he set himself the tough goal of writing one song a week and publishing it to his website. He called it “Thing a Week”, and he succeeded plus earned himself a fanbase in the process. If you don’t know Coulton by name, you may have heard some of the popular results from his “Thing a Week” project: his funny programmer anthem, “Code Monkey” or the surprising, light-accoustic cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. All 52 tracks are now available on four albums.

In case those two examples don’t fully illustrate the particular brand of humor in Coulton’s music, let me also note that he is friends with the Daily Show’s John Hodgman. In fact, he made an appearance on the Daily Show to sing a song about dropping snakes from airplanes to defeat Iraqi insurgents and accompanied Hodgman on his list of “700 Hobo Names”. His subjects and lyrics are wry, wittty, and modern.

(More on Coulton, They Might Be Giants and this week’s notable new releases after the jump.)

Coulton’s “Thing a Week” reminds me of “Dial-a-Song”, by They Might Be Giants. If it weren’t for the fact that TMBG have a new (and I think excellent) album out this week (see below), it would almost seem that Coulton is hoping to inherit the “geek rock” mantel from them. Or like he’s some sort of meta-metaphysical love child of TMBG’s John Linnell and John Flansburgh. TMBG are Brooklyn-based, like Coulton. Coulton plays many of the quirky instruments that make up the TMBG’s signature sound: guitar, accordion, harmonica, mandolin, ukulele, and glockenspiel. And both have cultivated a loyal following by using creative, modern techniques and being extremely available and responsive to their fans.

Most of all, both Coulton and TMBG tackle similar topics from an off-beat perspective. For example, regarding science, TMBG have songs like “Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)”, while Coulton has a 5-song set called “Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms”, written for Popular Science magazine. Both have songs about modern life: TMBG’s “Experimental Film” and Coulton’s “Ikea” come to mind. The similarities are most striking when you notice that they even cover some of the same obscure topics. TMBG did a song on “James K. Polk” while Coulton performs “The Presidents”. If you heard “Re: Your Brains” you’d be hard pressed to know if Coulton or Linell was singing, but at the same time, songs like “Tom Cruise Crazy” are distinctively Coulton. (The song has the great line: “If you had Tom Cruise’s troubles, you might be Tom Cruise Crazy too.”)

The comparison is meant to be flattering and not meant to take detract from Coulton’s originality or intelligence. The point is, rather, if you like TMBG the odds are good that you’ll like Coulton.

This is “music for coders”, not “music for coding”. The difference is that while you’ll love the tunes, they may not help your productivity. In fact, I lost an hour or more surfing through all of the YouTube fan videos for “Code Monkey” which include everything from live action (my favorite) to Sims and World of Warcraft spoofs. So maybe this should be “music for your lunch break” instead.

If you are in the New York area, Coulton is playing a gig next week at Brooklyn’s Union Hall, tickets are $15. If you don’t catch him there, never fear, his website also lists his other upcoming performances or, since both you and Coulton are uber-geeks, you might prefer to catch a performance by his avatar, Yonatan Coalcliff, on Second Life (pictured above).

Jonathan Coulton album list

(with iTunes links)

• Smoking Monkey
• Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow (EP)
• Thing a Week One (contains “Baby Got Back”)
• Thing a Week Two
• Thing a Week Three (contains “Code Monkey”)
• Thing a Week Four

Other Notable Music This Week

• They Might Be Giants: The Else
• Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
• Dolores O’Riordan: Are You Listening? (formerly of The Cranberries)
• Rufus Wainwright: Release the Stars
• Pink Martini: Hey Eugene!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.