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Excess Data
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Most geeks have heard of Jonathan Coulton, and if they haven't, they should. Coulton (aka JoCo) is an indie music hero. In 2005 he left a day job writing software to pursue music full time. In the grand tradition of writing what you know, Coulton writes tuneful, funky songs about geek preoccupations and ephemera - the web, Flickr, programmer culture, gaming, zombies, you name it. He subscribes to a Creative Commons creative and business practice, making much of his music available free or exceedingly cheap online, and encourages fans to remix and repurpose his work into music videos of their own, comic books and more. Jonathan has worked as the 'Contributing Troubadour' at Popular Science Magazine and became well known for his groundbreaking Thing A Week project, where he wrote, recorded and released a new work each week for an entire year - a "forced march" to creativity. His star continues to rise - The New York Times recently made him their poster boy for cool and clever music emerging from the online world, and his gig calendar rarely has a day spare. He's also been tagged (we think aptly), as a model of geek hotness. Adorable (the beard is scrumptious), smart, humble, talented and good with his hands - the kind of guy any smart chick would love to take home to meet the folks. GI tracked the Net legend down in Brooklyn for a chat about his sounds, his craft, his relationship with technology and more. We started by asking him about his connection to music. Has it been a life long passion, or an after-9-to-5-life renaissance? “I’m always amazed when I do the calculations, how many years I’ve been playing guitar," he says. "It’s a lot, or at least more than it should be, given how not good I am at playing it. When I actually do the math I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years. When you do something for 20 years you think… if I do something for 20 years I’ll be good at it by then. I feel like I’m good enough for maybe 5 years, not 20.” Coulton hails from a musical family. “Even when I was a kid my mum and I use to sing harmonies in the car. I was forced to take piano lessons and I used to tinker around and play other stuff. My dad played the guitar, and when I was way too little to really play, I learned a couple of things. And then in high school I picked up a guitar, mostly because it was really awesome to play in front of girls. It became really clear to me that girls really appreciated it when you could play You’ve Got A Friend on the guitar. That was about when I started writing songs. It’s been a long time, but it was really a hobby until about two years ago.” Music, with its on the page, explicit vocabulary, isn’t altogether distinct from binary code. So do math and music occupy the same brain space for Coulton? “Yes, that’s very true,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in both music and science. And I always imagined the answer to the question of what you’ll be when you grow up as - something with music and computers. And here we are. I do think that for me it does work a lot of the same parts of my brain. There’s a language that you can communicate in or make things happen in. You develop mastery of that language by speaking in it and seeing and hearing what other people have done. Then you can construct this thing. Writing code and writing songs are very similar. You know where you want to end up. You know what you want to evoke.” The most emotionally efficient permutation that lands you there? “Yeah. You have various tools that you can use and the more concise and elegant it is the better it turns out.” The diversity of sound emerging from man and machine in the Coulton equation is mind-boggling. Like many modern musos, he's geared up with a range of gadgetry - much of it deceptively simple - that produces a menagerie of clicks and whirrs to delight the ears. “It wasn't possible five or ten years ago," he concedes. "I do everything on a Mac Mini. Pro-tools audio software package. I have a bunch of guitars, a few microphones, a couple of keyboards. It amazes me what you can do. When I first started recording I was working with a cassette recorder, an acoustic guitar, a mic and a chorus pedal. And it was very challenging. Now it’s crazy. For not very much money you can sound very professional.” So does his success and visibility buy him more creative leisure now he's hanging with the kids from the NYT and away from the water cooler? “It’s funny.
Also written by Venessa Paech
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 All content ©2010 Geek Illustrated. 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0All Rights Reserved. All your base belong to us. © All rights reserved Geek Illustrated |
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Venessa Paech - Editor & Founder. Venessa holds a BFA from NYU. She has done the arts to death, and has been in love with the web since she "discovered" it at a CyberCafe in NYC in '93. She wants to be a podcaster when she grows up.
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