JONATHAN COULTON
Interview by Anders Bylund
(October 2010)
Jonathan Coulton is not your average rock star
A former computer programmer, educated at Yale and steeped in a capella traditions via the Spizzwinks and the Whiffenpoofs, Coulton quit his day job in 2005 to try something new. 52 weeks later, he had written and recorded 52 songs and was making a living from MP3 sales and a spirited touring schedule. If the name sounds familiar, you're either a video game enthusiast or a zombie freak -- his best-known works are "Still Alive," written for Valve's Portal, and "Re: Your Brains," which is a reasonable plea from a zombie and also featured in Left 4 Dead 2.
Coulton revels in offbeat themes and hummable melodies, and his online marketing strategy makes him a new-wave hero to many wannabe musicians. He took time out from his regularly scheduled slacking to speak about songwriting, zombies, and babysitters.
PSF: You're a multi-instrumentalist. Do you record every part of your songs by yourself like Mike Oldfield did for Tubular Bells or Dave Grohl on the first Foo Fighters album?
J: I do, except I really am best with the guitar. I play some other stringed instruments, well or not, I sort of fake that I play them. I play piano -- badly, but again I can fake it. And, you know, I do play drums but I don't actually have a drum set, so drums usually are not played by me. But yeah, everything I record is me, I don't work with any other musicians.
PSF: I know you're involved with the Rock Band video games. Have you tried hooking up the Rock Band drums as a MIDI instrument?
J: (laughs) No, I haven't messed around with that.
PSF: How much of your songwriting tends to happen while you're recording, messing around with the production process?
J: Yeah, it varies. It depends on the song. If I'm on a deadline, I tend to start recording earlier in the writing process. There are some songs that come pretty easily and I can sort of write them all the way through without too much thought, and then there are other songs that are really stubborn about getting finished. So, I'll have a couple of verses and a chorus and I'll be sort of stuck on the third verse, and a lot of times I actually find that beginning the recording process is a good way to work through that. If you flesh out everything else and the only thing left is to write four lines, then it's like "just do it!" But I like it best when I have a whole song written and I can play it all the way through on the guitar, and then I start to record cause I just find that there's something nice about having an entire song before you begin any of the arranging.
PSF: Do you have any examples of easy and hard songs to write?
J: Yeah, let's see, to take a couple of examples -- something like "Code Monkey" was really easy. I sort of came up with this idea of a guy speaking in broken English and he's a sad software guy, and from there it was like, "oh, well I know this." The first verse sort of introduces the guy and the second verse is about this girl at the front desk, there's some sort of bridge, and then the last one is sort of a sad, determined look to the future. Once you have that arc, it's like I know exactly what the words should be, it's pretty easy to write that through.
But then, something like "A Talk With George" was a really hard one for me to write. It's a lesser-known one because it's not funny or anything, but it's about running into the ghost of George Plimpton and having him give you some advice. I wanted to write a song about George Plimpton, and I really just hated it the whole time I was writing it 'cause it seems kind of stupid. It was one of those kind of Wikipedia songs where I was just listing a bunch of stuff that George Plimpton did, and it was kind of boring and gimmicky. But I had a guitar part that I really liked, and it felt like a more sentimental piece of music than the lyrics were turning out, but I started recording anyway and once I fleshed out the arrangement, the emotion of it was enhanced by knowing what the arrangement was gonna be. And then I think that sort of helped me to tweak the lyrics a little bit so it was less a list of things that George did and more things that you should do in your life, and that sort of transformed it. Made it a little more subtle and more directly led to the emotion of it, which I think was not there when I was just writing it and playing it on the guitar.
PSF: Does it come easy to you as a rule or do you run into "A Talk With George" situations often?
J: I would say it's hard most of the time. I mean, getting from the initial idea to the finished song is a really hard part, you know? Because you get the first few pieces of it and then there's always a valley that I get stuck in where it's really work, where it's really about sitting down and write and less about inspiration. The inspiration part is easy- it's a type of by-itself, uncontrollable thing, you know? And then actually finishing a song is usually pretty hard for me.
PSF: You're a lot about performing live, with you and a guitar, and that's about it. Do you write for that kind of presentation to begin with or do you just write and figure out later how to make it work on stage?
J: I definitely write on the guitar most of the time -- sometimes the ukulele. Sometimes some other instrument will provide a musical idea, a little riff on the piano that I like, or the banjo. But mostly I write on guitar because I can play most fluidly on the guitar, so you have to sort of translate what you're hearing in your head to the instrument in order to write, and I can only really do that on the guitar. And then, sometimes I'll have a pretty clear idea of the arrangement as I'm writing. I'll know where I want the background vocal to be, or I'll know what the extra guitar parts are gonna be, or I'll know that I want a bloopy-bloopy keyboard in there or something like that. Again, it varies, so I think it's nicest when the arrangements are part of the inspiration -- where I can hear background vocals as I'm writing, and that leads to a better result. I'm not always good at translating a pure song for just voice and guitar into a full-blown arrangement, and it's nicer when there's a component of the arrangement that comes to me unbidden, you know?
PSF: Did the Thing-A-Week project, where you committed to releasing a new song every week for a year, change how you write?
J: It was supposed to, and I certainly learned about my process a lot. I learned that I can produce stuff even when I don't want to produce stuff, but having said that, it hasn't made it any easier for me! (laughs) It's one of those things where you learn a lesson about how to make creative work happen but you still fall for the same old traps every time, so ... You would think that doing that 52 weeks in a row and overcoming that same valley in the middle of the process where it was hard and it seemed like it's a terrible song and it felt like I was never gonna finish, and then discovering, well, actually you can finish. Doing that 52 times in a row, still, this never went away and I think that's just ... you know, if there's one thing I'm worried about my process, it's that it's always gonna be hard.
PSF: Are there any songs from those 52 weeks that you wish you could go back and do over, touch up a bit, or add to at this point?
J: Yeah, I think so. There are definitely some aspects of the recording that I'm not happy with, I mean, I was frequently doing the recording in a very rushed way, so I didn't have time to decide that this or that piece of it was no good, and figure out something else that worked, you know. It frequently was Friday afternoon when I just had to finish the song before the babysitter went home, you know, so there's a lot of those. And I think songwriting-wise, there were times when the song was not really finished; songs where I had to sort of force myself to write a third verse that I wasn't completely happy with but that had to stay. So there are little pieces that sort of filling in the final gaps in a song makes you live with what you do and it's not always what you would choose. But I also hate going back to songs that are finished, so I don't think that I'm gonna go back and fix any of those things. They are what they are.
PSF: You're this self-described soft-rocking geek, right? And then you write about insane evil geniuses ("Skullcrusher Mountain") and negotiating zombies ("Re: Your Brains"), and I wonder where you get the inspiration from. Is songwriting like a therapy for you?
J: No, I think it's just... for me to write a song, I need to have something compelling to write about, I need to have a sort of challenging subject, I find, because there's something about just having to write a plain old love song without any twist or angle that to me is just really boring. There's nothing to drive me to do that, but if I decide to do a love song, but it's an evil genius singing a love song, then it's like a puzzle. It's an opportunity to make some jokes or an opportunity to flesh out a character and tell a story, to sort of tease out what it is about that guy. Why is he in love? Who is he in love with? How did he show that he's in love? What are his failings in that picture? To me, I sort of need that to be able to write. Otherwise it's like, what's the point, you know? I write about a lot of nerdy stuff because I think about a lot of nerdy stuff, and in particular, the off-kilter topics are things that sort of keep me going when I'm writing.
PSF: Can you talk about what you're working on now?
J: Yeah, it's not much of an interesting time right now because I just did a whole bunch of touring in the first few months of this year, and I was on the road a lot and that really wreaks havoc with having any time to be creative.
On top of that, recently, the house that I've been living in has been undergoing some construction so I just literally do not have space to record yet and I haven't for a long time. There are several ideas in my head and some half-written songs, and I really need to sit down and finish them up. I've been writing songs sporadically since the end of Thing-A-Week, sort of fitting it in between touring, and I'm happy with a lot of the stuff that I've done. Really, I think that the goal is, I have maybe eight songs since the end of Thing-A-Week which is a really meager output. I'm sort of looking forward to writing a few more and bundling those up in a new CD and releasing it, and then sort of moving on to whatever the next project is. I don't think I would know what that next project would be yet.
PSF: You got a great response for your work on the Portal video game by Valve. You're not on the Portal 2 soundtrack?
J: I will be doing music for Portal 2 as well, yeah. You know, I think Valve and I were both really happy with how 'Still Alive' turned out, and it was an overwhelmingly popular response to something we thought was maybe gonna be a bit weird and unusual. We weren't sure how it was gonna go. And so it's gonna be hard to live up to that success, and it was sort of a surprise to everyone, us included, so... I don't know, we'll see. The sequel is always a troublesome thing, and sequels are rarely better than the original. Empire Strikes Back is the only exception that I can think of.
PSF: Who inspires you? If I make a Pandora station based on your name, I get They Might Be Giants, Barenaked Ladies, Weird Al and Cake. Does that describe your tastes at all?
J: Yeah! TMBG, certainly, I'm a huge fan of theirs and they've always been a huge inspiration to me in terms of songwriting. Weird Al, definitely. When I was a kid, I loved Weird Al -- I still do, he's a very talented man and he's got great original songs in addition to the parody stuff that he does. Barenaked Ladies and Cake, I don't know them as well but I certainly like them. You know, as inspirations to me, I would add Billy Joel who I listened to almost exclusively when I was growing up and Loudon Wainwright, who is maybe better known now as Rufus Wainwright's father but before Rufus got famous, he was a pretty successful singer/songwriter, sort of folk-guitar guy. Who else? I mean, that's really the core of it in terms of the soul of the songwriting that I like to do.
PSF: I've come across what seems like obvious R.E.M. references here and there across your work -- In "Mandelbrot Set," you have a line about "a splinter in my eye" which comes straight from "Harborcoat," and you ask "should we talk about the government (that I control)" in "I'm A Mason Now." Echoes of "Pop Song '89"?
J: You know, I have never realized it until now. Coincidence or theft? You decide! That's interesting, I hadn't thought of that. You know, I listened to a lot of R.E.M. when I was in high school, and the way songwriting works is, it's just the output of the food processor that is your brain. So you listen to music, and phrases come to you from whereever. It's all based on music you've heard, and I would not be surprised if those little bits were floating around in my subsconscious and came out in these songs. But not on purpose, at all.
PSF: You're not at SXSW this year, judging by your Twitter feed?
J: I am not at SXSW. The last two years I went there, just the interactive part, I did not go to the music part. I don't know, the music scene -- music festivals like that -- I'm not a huge fan of live music to begin with, which sounds kind of crazy, but... (laughs) I really like recorded music. I do enjoy going to see shows every now and then, certain bands I'll go out and see, but I totally like listening to music that I know very well. That's one of the things that throws me off about live music because it doesn't sound exactly like the record so... (laughs)
PSF: And you don't go to join a community, to interact with other musicians, that sort of thing?
J: Well, the only reason I'm not at the interactive this year is because my travel schedule was just too full, and I couldn't make it. But I have enjoyed hobnobbing with other Internet people, which really in a way feels more like my peers than musicians do. I mean, I've hung out with other musicians too but I always feel like they are real musicians and I'm a fake musician when I'm hanging out with them, whereas when I hang out with Internet people -- other Internet-famous people -- it just feels more like my co-workers than musicians. And that's not to take anything away from the musicians, it's just that I frequently have more in common with somebody who has a very popular blog than somebody who has a very popular record.
PSF: On that note, you license your music under the open-source Creative Commons framework and you have your own Wiki (JoCopedia), and I guess your code monkey is showing.
J: Yeah!
PSF: So someone like K.T. Tunstall speaks about album sales as just a tool to promote her live gigs, which is in line with the Creative Commons philosophy. Is your attitude to record sales and file sharing and whatnot similar to Tunstall's?
J: I think that there are a lot of gray areas and I think there's a wide range of uses for file sharing. I always try to be honest with myself about what my conscience is telling me, so when I... for instance, I wouldn't at all mind somebody downloading my music and listening to it and deciding that they don't like it and me never getting a dollar. Or you know, even deciding that they like it a little bit, kind of, and they're glad they heard it but they don't become a huge fan, I don't care if I don't make money from that person -- I don't think I should make money from that person.
Lord knows I have been known to download an MP3 here and there to check somebody out, but if I decide that I really like that artist, I know that the money I spend on them will eventually find its way to them. So I still buy music even though I don't have to, and I think that is true for a lot of people. In fact, a lot of people say file sharing the recorded music, not selling it and giving it away is about creating a market for live shows, and that's certainly true about some component of what's going on for me but I also find that giving away music actually supports people buying the music -- for that reason. People know that if they send money my way I get it, you know? They want to support me. I can't tell you how many people come up to me after shows and hand me a $20 bill and say, "Here, I downloaded a bunch of music for free and I never paid for it so I probably owe you this money." You know? And it's not as though a huge portion of my income comes from people handing me $20 bills but it just goes to show that I think people really do feel that way about the artists that they like, and they are willing to support artists whether it's by going to live shows or buying T-shirts or even buying music that they already own.
That happens a lot too, people will buy the entire collection because a year ago they doenloaded 30 or 40 songs and they listen to them all the time and they're like, "Uh, maybe I should give that guy some money." There is no question in my mind that file sharing does benefit artists because, it's just in my experience doing it.
I think you can't control what everybody does, and you can't control everybody's sense of morality. You just have to look at the big picture. Certainly, some people are quote-unquote "feeling for me," you know, there are some people who are maybe huge fans of the music and are laughing about how they were able to get it for free and not give me any money, but there are plenty of other people who do support me and whether a super-fan has paid for my music or not, chances are that they're gonna play it for their friends and that's always a good thing.