A conversation with the singer/songwriter and Internet sensation.

Question: How did you get into comedy songwriting? 

Jonathan Coulton: Well, I've always been interested in music. I played instruments when I was young and sang when I was young and was in the band and the chorus in school. And I think somewhere in high school I had decided that I actually wanted to make a profession out of it and become a professional musician and then didn't do much about that for many years. And, you know, like many people, went to college because that's what you do. Then some point after college, found myself in New York City, not really knowing exactly what I was doing there and had a few short-lived jobs and put a band together kind of but never really did anything with it. Played out a few times for our friends and ultimately found myself working in the software industry writing code for a company in New York and did that for about nine years and kept doing music on the side, recording things and writing things, just for my own amusement mostly. 

Question: How did a cappella affect your songwriting? 

Jonathan Coulton: It is true that I was in the Whiffenpoofs in college and before that the Spizzwinks. Those are two of the oldest all male a cappella collegiate singing groups in the world. So, very proud to be a part of them and the Whiffenpoofs really were kind of one of the reasons I wanted to go to Yale. My dad went to college there and my grandfather went to college there and so, when I was growing up, they both had old records, Whiffenpoofs LPs that they would play for me. So I was familiar with collegiate a cappella music in a way that many American kids were not. 

I was thinking recently some friends of mine from the a cappella community who I had been out of touch with for a while, recently came to one of my shows in New York for the first time and as I was doing my standard Jonathan Coulton show, I was thinking of them in the audience and I realized how much my shtick on stage really does owe to whatever it was that I learned when I was doing a cappella. Because, you're in this group of people and for me it was a group of 14 guys all wearing tuxedos and you're standing in a big circle and you're singing, you know, ironic covers of popular songs, but also sort of jazz standards. And there's a mix of stuff that you're really quite serious about. You're serious about the music but you're also wearing a tuxedo and white gloves and a white tie. It's ridiculous, you know. And you're doing a lot of funny stuff in between the serious stuff and it's very shtick-y and hammy. So I think I actually took a lot from that. I mean, that's how I learned to be a person on stage. And so that still applies to what I do in my show even though I'm now a rock star. I don't wear a tuxedo anymore. 

Question: One of your first breakout songs was “Code Monkey.” How much did that come out of your life at that time? 

Jonathan Coulton: "Code Monkey" is a song about a sad software developer. It’s loosely autobiographical. It is true that while I was working there I felt some frustration about not having allowed myself to pursue what I believed was my true calling. I was there for nine years and it wasn't a terrible job. I actually liked it quite a bit. I learned a lot. I had fun and good people there. But there was that vague dissatisfaction. So I used that when I wrote the song, but it is loosely autobiographical. The guy in the song really, really hates, really, really hates his job, and in particular, his boss. I did not hate my boss. I loved all of my bosses and they were never as boring as I described them in the song. I'll say that for them.  

Question: How do you write a comedy song? 

Jonathan Coulton: I like it best when there's just a little crystal of an idea that comes from somewhere, I know not where, and it just sort of springs forth. A little tiny idea. It can be a line, or an image or just something that a character would say and, ideally, when it works best, it's a thing that occurs to me and then I immediately know everything about that character. It's a little nugget of a thing that makes me completely understand who this person is and then it just sort of comes out and it's very easy. 

It's rarely like that however. More often, I have to really kickstart that process at any number of points. So I might sit around with a guitar and just play and play and play and play. You know, noodling until I come up with a musical idea that I like. And then I'll play the musical idea over and over again and sort of hum nonsense syllables against it until I hear a word that I think works and maybe that word becomes something. You know, "I know this line ends with the word 'dissolve.' And so, what rhymes with dissolve and then what could that be about?" And along the way you have to sort of keep stepping back and looking at it and seeing if it makes sense and thinking about where you wanted to take the listener and just sort of piece by piece, stringing it together until it's the thing that you believe it should be. 

Question: What genres have proven most influential in your music? 

Jonathan Coulton: I'm a real sucker for the slow, sad, sensitive, folky stuff. I really am. It's one of the reasons that I love bluegrass. I came to listen to bluegrass relatively recently but it’s one of the few styles of music that actually can move me to tears when I'm listening to it. Some of the sadder bluegrass songs are so amazingly powerful, have such an emotional quality to them even though the music is very simple and the message is very simple. There's always a child dying or somebody's mother is dying or it's somebody just missing their family who's far away. It's very simple concepts but something about the simplicity of the music and the simplicity of the ideas, just expressed in this really raw way. Really, really hits me. 

And so I try when I can to, you know a lot of the time I am writing funny songs, but I try to bring out that emotional aspect of it when I can. I try to find sympathy for the characters that I'm writing about, even if they're ridiculous, which frequently they are. I like to think, "Well, what, you know what do they want?" and more important, "What is it that they want that they're not getting, that they're never going to get and why is that sad to them?" That’s to me the heart of writing a good song, is getting to that piece of it. 

Question: What bluegrass song really does it for you? 

Jonathan Coulton: I can't think of the name of the song now, but it's a Stanley Brothers song and it might be called “My Precious Children,” or something like that, but he's talking about how his kids have grown up and moved away and it used to be the family was together all the time and now they're dispersed and he rarely sees them. I'm getting a little shivery just thinking about it and maybe it's because I'm a parent now that, that means so much to me, but that's the one that you know I was driving somewhere in the car and that song came on and I started weeping. It's really, really amazing. 

Question: Tell us about “The Future Soon” and how it reflects your feelings about the future? 

Jonathan Coulton: It's a future that you might imagine if you were 13 years old growing up sometime in the 1980s and you were all alone in your room reading Omni magazine. I spent many hours exactly like that when I was 13 in the 1980s. So, yes, you know there are pieces of that character that are definitely me. He's jilted by a girl that he loves and imagines an elaborate revenge fantasy that also involves him improving himself. That’s his vision of the future: technology will save him and somehow make him more powerful, and really just sort of even him up with everybody else. 

There are definitely times, particularly in my early teens, where I felt like that. Not necessarily that I was going to build and command a robot army, but you know just the promise of technology is frequently about evening the score, making things accessible for everyone in a way that they haven't been. So I think my favorite kind of futurist thinking is that kind of futurist thinking. I am a fan of technology and science and I know there are a lot of people who don't feel that way, who fear technology and progress. And you know they don't necessarily have to be luddites to be that way. They may use cell phones and computers, but at the same time, they feel like technology is a Pandora's box that has been opened and all of the ills of the world are gradually destroying our society and tearing us apart and isolating us and destroying the planet. 

And you know maybe they're right but I kind of think that if you look at progress, in particular technological progress, if you take any sort of rational long view of what has happened so far, you'd have to come away with the opinion that ,overall, it's been good for humans here on earth. And I fully expect that trend will continue and certainly there are a lot of challenges, you know. There are millions of gallons of crude oil pouring in to the ocean right now and that's a terrible thing and it's a terrible side effect of our technological footprint on this planet. But, I believe that we can face these challenges and I believe we can solve these problems and I think that we will, because that's sort of what we're here to do. 

Question: What inspired the Mandelbrot Set song? 

Jonathan Coulton: Yes, I was very flattered to see that you asked him that question about the song and that he'd heard of it and had an opinion of it. The only thing I would like to say to him is, "I apologize that I got the math wrong." I have been informed by numerous mathematicians, both experts and armchair that I am actually describing a Julia set and not the Mandelbrot set. I still don't exactly understand the difference. So I apologize for acting as though I was an expert on the subject, when in fact, I was mostly just mining Wikipedia and doing my best to put it into lyrics for a song. 

Question: Do you consider yourself "internet famous?"

Jonathan Coulton: I definitely consider myself "internet famous" at this point. I think the difference between famous and "internet famous," it's a dividing line that is getting a little fuzzier, really month by month at this point, not just for me but I think as our culture changes, and I think it's about the medium that you are famous in. If you are famous for being on television, you are reaching a much larger and broader audience, than anyone who's on the Internet. As popular as certain ideas and people have become on the Internet, they don't really reach that kind of super fame, that sort of global broad appeal until they move into television. 

You know you can look at anything... like Twitter for example, you know that was a thing that I heard about through somebody else, signed up for it, started using... Nobody cared about it, you know, I was explaining it to my friends and they thought I was crazy. And then you started to see people on the Internet got excited about it and started using it and so it was sort of an internet thing and then you started to see people talking about it all the time on television. That was a very quick transformation. It was very, very quick it moved into that medium. And that's the point when it became a really famous thing. And it's a thing that almost everybody knows about now. Maybe they don't understand it. Frequently when it's mentioned, it's accompanied by a lame joke about how it's weird or stupid or whatever. So you know in many ways, it's infamous outside of the Internet rather than being famous. 

But you know, for me my fame is very targeted, it's not local because it doesn't have anything to do with physical space, but it's local on the map of ideas and taste, you know, because I'm famous on the Internet for writing a certain kind of song. And that appeals to a certain kind of person who's interested in certain things. And within a certain community, I'm pretty well-known. But just walking down the street here in New York, nobody knows who I am. I'm rarely recognized in public. And so in many ways it's the best of both worlds, because I have a fan base that is large and loyal enough to support me and I get that ego boost that is you know, I know now is kind of critical to me you know, that feedback from people telling me that they like this song or that song or that they really enjoyed this concert or that CD. 

I get that back and forth, but at the same time, I can see how having that kind of relationship with the entire world would be kind of unpleasant. You think about somebody like, poor Michael Jackson, who can't really go out in public anymore. Well, now he's dead but when he was alive, he could not go out in public anymore. And I think it's a bizarre thing, that the people that we love the most, we force them to become shut-ins. We've sort of cut them off from the rest of the world. It’s a strange thing that fame does. 

Question: Why do certain ideas become Internet famous and others don’t? 

Jonathan Coulton: Well, I think that there are a couple of things at play, that govern what kinds of ideas become "internet famous." One of them is just the fact that there are more geeks on the Internet than there are non-geeks on the Internet. And this is just because the Internet is still a relatively new medium on this planet. So I think a lot has been made of the ascendance of geek culture and you'd be crazy if you didn't think a lot of that had to do with the fact that there is the Internet and now all these people who use computers have a way to use their computers to get together in different ways, to communicate and create things and disseminate ideas and bounce them off of one another and change ideas. So I think part of it is just the Internet is the perfect medium for geeks because geeks like computers and that's mostly where the Internet is you know. 

But aside from that, I do think the common thread that a lot of internet culture shares is a kind of hyper-postmodernism. I barely know what I'm talking about here so bear with me, but you know I think there's a kind of humor, in particular, that is unique to the Internet and it has to do with referencing other things in an ironic way, in re-imagining them in a certain way, recycling ideas. Of course this is part of what postmodernism means, but I think there's sort of winky aspect to the things that become really popular in internet culture that sort of sits on top of that standard postmodernism, you know, collage combination of different ideas. Look at LOLCats for example. Which is bizarre and could only exist on the Internet and is, I think a real good measuring device for determining if somebody is part of internet culture or not. You know, they're basically funny pictures of cats, with a caption you know. And so you can say, well that's dumb, that's you know there are lots of greeting cards that are like that. We've had that for a long time. But there's a self-referential quality to LOLCats and it's the language that cats speak, somehow, it's this kind of pigeon language that cats speak and it kind of makes sense. I mean, if you're a fan of LOLCats, the reason you like it is because you see a caption and a funny picture and yes, you are looking at a funny caption of a funny cat picture, but also there's a joke there and it's very hard to explain what that joke is to somebody who doesn't get it. And it has to do with that language that cats speak, that is made up, that somehow a very large group of strangers all seems to agree that this is the language that cats speak. And so, I sound like a lunatic just talking about it. And that is, I think, a perfect example of the things that become popular on the Internet and why, even though I haven't really said why because I don't even know why. 

Question: What do you see yourself as? 

Jonathan Coulton: I walk a dangerous line between comedy and non-comedy music. Like many who've come before me, I'm not the first to do it and it's a troubling thing sometimes to be known as the guy who writes funny songs when in actuality my favorite songs are the ones that are not funny at all. My favorite songs of mine are the very sad ones. And so, yes, you know I think it is, I think it is crazy, I have learned that it is crazy for any artist to decide how they want, what kind of artist they want to be known as. You don't get to decide that. The best-case scenario for you if you're an artist, is to make the things that you love. To make the things that you want to make and to have a group of fans who like it and support you and who make it possible for you to continue making more stuff. That's all you can ask for and I think if you start to worry about, are people going to think of me as a novelty musician, when really I'm a sensitive writer of important songs, then that way lies madness. Because it's not up to you to decide and there's little you can do to change anyone's mind. Once you've put the stuff out there that is yours, people will make of it what they will and you're lucky to even be thinking about trying to change that. So shut up. That's kind of what I think about that. So, I'm just so pleased to be here and you know I feel so fortunate to be making a living this way. I'm happy for the fans who think of me as a novelty musician and I'm happy for the fans who think of me as a writer of important songs. However you like me, I'm just glad that you like me. 

Question: What do you geek out on online? 

Jonathan Coulton: Boy, what do I geek out on? There's a guy named Ze Frank who I have stolen from quite frequently. I don't even know how you would describe him. He's a writer; he's sort of a professional "internet famous" person. He does projects on the Internet but they exist on so many different levels. They're really interesting. He made an earth sandwich once and he set up a piece of software, where you could plug in your coordinates and it would tell you the spot opposite, on the opposite side of the globe; would show you on a map where that was. And then people signed up and coordinated with each other, sort of a contest, and two groups of people on opposite sides of the planet arranged at the same time to lay a piece of bread down on the spot on the globe that was opposite. So they made an earth sandwich. And it's a perfect example of the kind of stuff that Ze does. You know he uses technology to bring complete strangers together for an absolutely ridiculous project that somehow still has a lot of heart to it. 

So, let's see, what else. You know my friend John Hodgman, I bad mentioning him because everybody's going to think I'm mentioning him just because he's my friend, but I think he's an incredibly talented writer and comedian and he is another person that I think just creates really terrific stuff that makes you laugh and sometime later, makes you cry, because it's ridiculous but it's also true. I'm a big admirer of his work. 

What else? Oh gosh, you've put me on the spot here. OK Go, I think. They're maybe a little more mainstream now. Those guys are pretty famous but and it seems trite to even talk about their music videos because I think most people agree that they are awesome, but you know, every time a new video comes out. I am amazed that they have been able to top themselves. And again, they start with a very simple concept, these are frequently pretty low-budget videos, but it's that perfect concept that you can somehow do quite a lot with even though it's a very small idea. Their music is great too, but I think they are just super, super creative talented people on all fronts and I'm very jealous of them. 

Question: What did your song about "Portal" mean to you as a video games fan?