Thing a Week Redux @jonathancoulton - Tumblr Blog

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Thing a Week 52: We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions

Unbelievably, we are here. Thanks to all of you who sent in hand claps – every one of them is in there. It was very charming how almost all of you apologized for the quality of the recording, and suggested that I just throw it away and forget about it if it was unusable. I have taught you well – always, ALWAYS doubt yourself.

I’m sad and relieved that it’s the end. It’s been a really amazing trip from 1 to 52, and I can’t thank all of you enough for the many different kinds of support you’ve offered me over this last year. If you bought a CD, if you bought a song, if you sent a donation, if you drew a picture, if you made a video, if you stole a song and passed it along to a friend, if you babysat while I recorded vocals, even if you just wrote me to tell me you like the music, you are one of the reasons that this lasted a whole year. The difference between my life then and my life now is enormous, and it’s all because of you. And while the standard rich and famous contract continues to elude me, in the ways that really matter I am filthy, stinking rich.

Thank you.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: The audacity! The nice thing about covering a song like this is that it takes the pressure off - you can always blame your failure to excel on the original being so iconic and irreplaceable. Though I think we did pretty well all things considered. Getting the hand claps from everyone felt absolutely correct, and the scope of the song is huge and epic, which seemed important. Once I'd hit on this as the final song, I couldn't think of anything that fit better.

I couldn't get the boom claps right, so I got them wrong in a different way. There are plenty of mix and arrangement problems I can hear, but boy was I tired of solving those! I love the way it veers into the instrumental section at the end of We Will Rock You with the slide guitar and the sweeping vocals. The slow picky arrangement of We Are the Champions works pretty well I think, and the understated nature of it gives the whole thing a fresh coat of poignant. Arranging it as a sad song is somewhat predictable given my tendencies, but still appropriate. It's always sounded to me like a slightly depressing, "non-victory" victory song. "No time for losers cuz we are the champions of the world" - sounds a lot like a Jonathan Coulton character to me. Pathetic but proud, no self-knowledge, tragically sure of himself. Possibly a monkey or a robot (technically, you can't tell if it is a monkey or robot or not, I'm just saying).

Just like in Thing a Week five years ago, here I am at the end and I've already said a tearful goodbye last week. What a relief! I'm not sure what to say, except thank you again and again and again. There was no reason at all to suspect that this ridiculous plan was going to work. The only reason it did was because of the various kinds of support I got from complete strangers all over the web and all over the world. I am grateful, always.

It's a strange time for musicians and the business that lives around them. It's a simple truth that For Sale competes with Free in the digital realm. That's just the way it is. We don't get to decide if it's good for us or not, because we've already demonstrated that this is the way we want things to work. So now we have to figure out what to do.

In my experience, For Sale wins often enough that it doesn't matter what's happening on the Free side. This may not be true for everyone. You could argue that people only pay for things because the iTunes store came along and made it slightly easier to buy than to steal. You could suggest that the only reason it works for me is because I write funny songs about monkeys and robots. You could predict that in ten years, the downward trend of the value of a song in mp3 form will lead us to a place where music is free. I might grant you all of those things, but I still think we're going to be fine. Music isn't going away - it was here long before we figured out a way to make money from it, and it will be here at least until the day we all upload our brains into the giant universe-shaped computer and disappear. The music business is an accident, a side-effect, an unintended consequence; music comes from humans.

I'm immensely proud of Thing a Week, partially because of what I accomplished, but more because of what WE accomplished. My plan, if you can call it that, was to concede victory to Free at the start. You guys pay me anyway, almost as if you "like music" and "want to support musicians." Dummies.

Thank you for everything.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 51: Summer's Over

Isn’t it though? Here’s the thing – this is song #51, and the next one is #52 and I’m freaking out. It was very hard to write this one. You can imagine how much pressure I’m feeling at this point to wrap the whole thing up with a couple of really kick-ass songs about monkeys and robots, really blow everybody’s mind. As a result, I can’t think of anything really interesting to say about monkeys or robots. So this one’s just about somebody leaving somebody else at the end of the summer (hint: no it’s not, it’s about the end of Thing a Week).

It was especially hard because I knew something you didn’t, which is that this is the last song I’ll write for Thing a Week. Next week is going to be a cover. Why yes, it is a cop out. But really, I can’t imagine writing something that’s as appropriate as this cover song will be – you’ll see. It just feels right to me.

Speaking of which, I need a little something from you folks to make it happen. If you have the capability to record decently (no built-in laptop microphones please), I would like you to record a single hand clap and email it to me. Your best hand clap please, mp3 is fine as long as it’s a pretty decent bitrate. By doing so you agree to let me use it for whatever I want from now until the end of time without getting any sort of credit for it, ever. But you’ll be on a CD.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Of all the songs that I can't remember writing, this one feels the most like it was implanted in my history by space aliens. No idea. I was playing it close to the vest in the blog, keeping it light, but there was definitely some heavy emotional stuff going on about the approaching end of Thing a Week.

I've always had trouble with transitions. I get obsessed with the borders between things - everything that came before this moment was X, everything after will be Y. I can't help but try to unpack that moment, savor it, hate it. Birthdays, graduations, moving day, they're all terrible. All that stuff functioned as a multiplier for the standard weekly performance anxiety, which had been growing larger all year anyway. It was overwhelming. So I tricked me, and I made this one the last one. I basically left without saying goodbye (though technically I do say goodbye quite a few times in this song).

I have a vague memory of still having large gaps in the lyrics during the recording process, so I'm betting that this song really didn't get started until Thursday or Friday. There are a couple of clunker lines in there, and sitting here with all this distance, they seem incredibly easy to fix. Or maybe I just write differently now. Anyway, I forgive myself for the melodrama with all the flowers dying and the cold wind, because I absolutely love the kicker lines at the ends of the verses. And the middle section with the lonely accordion and the a cappella singing group vocals sounds positively cinematic to me. All in all, it feels pleasantly unfamiliar enough to convince me that during this period, I was really WRITING in a way I never had before.

That bit about goodbyes moving in circles hits me hard here in this hotel room in wherever-I-am. Five years ago I was finishing Thing a Week, feeling proud and hopeful about the possibilities, but coming up on a scary stretch of unknown territory - what now? Hodgman's first book was out and I was about to accompany him on his big book tour. I was just starting to do my own shows in other cities. I was gearing up to release all the Thing a Week songs as albums. I was ready to admit that this was my job. It was the end of TAW but the beginning of everything else, very much a time of LAUNCHING things. None of which was at all obvious to me at the time.

And now here I am in this hotel room in wherever-I-am, on tour with They Might Be Giants. They've got a new album out, I've got a new album out, I've got this new band, all these new songs about grownup things. Hodgman has another new book coming out and is about to start touring. So here we are again, five years later, and I'm truly grateful and amazed, but still facing the same scary stretch of unknown territory. What now?

I like to play the game where I imagine going back to tell five-years-ago me what was about to happen to him. There's no way he would believe it. And I think that's what really gets me about these transitions, the idea that the end of this thing you know is really just the beginning of this thing you haven't met yet. It seems like there should be a way to see that new thing, to figure it out ahead of time instead of blindly stumbling across it. Of course you can't - that's precisely the difference between the future and the past. And here we all are, eternally stuck in the present, where all you can do is close your eyes, put your head down, and go.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 50: Pull the String

This appears to be about a famous person with a terrible secret. It’s not about anyone in particular as far as I know. Maybe it’s about you – Tom Cruise! Or you – John Hodgman! It kind of reminds me of Big Bad World One, mostly because of the A/E ambiguity in the verse. Believe it or not, that acoustic riff in the verse is an idea that’s been floating around in my head since I was about 17 – it’s a relief to finally get that one out the door. Who’s next!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: I am listening now to this song for the first time in five years - I've never played this one live, haven't really thought about it since the day I uploaded it. Love that E over A thing. I am realizing now it reminds me of the piano lick between verse couplets in the Donald Fagen song "New Frontier" (oops, sorry Donald). Mix needs a lot of help, I seem to have layered myself into muddy territory during the pre choruses. Whoa, right, forgot about this bridge - what the? Abrupt, chopped off ending for extra drama, got it.

OK. Some good and bad here. On the plus side, I think most of the music is coming from an original place, or at least I don't hear the endless parade of standard JoCo tricks I usually resort to when I'm out of ideas. Maybe that's just because it's been so long since I've heard this song that I don't even remember how to play it right now, but the chord changes sound kind of fresh but catchy, which is the whole point of a pop song. I like the textural change-ups a lot, the way it gets big and small and loud and quiet. I was ashamed of the bridge the first time I heard it again, but listening a second time I think it's kind of nice - it's all new territory within the song, and I think the buildup thing works pretty well with the noisy guitars and everything. All of that stuff sounds to me like at least I was still inventing things at this point. Guitars are not awful. Lead vocal performance actually has a nice vibe to it, as if I cared about what I was singing, which is not always something I am able to capture when I'm singing into a microphone.

The biggest problem for me is the lyrics. I fell into the classic trap where the song is just about one thing and every line is just another way to describe that thing in a not very interesting way. Those kinds of songs can certainly work, but this one centers on a pretty nonspecific and low stakes idea, and it simply doesn't generate much heat. Also, there are a bunch of phrases in there that sound a little pat to me: "they all want in," "underneath your skin," "call your lawyer." It sounds like a Glen Frey song from 1984, where you're "in the night" and this or that thing is "dangerous" because something is happening "in your heart" or maybe "on the streets of this city." Oy.

I've written a lot of songs like this in my life, ones that should be good but are not because they lack some essential unnameable thing. This is the one you leave off the album, or you put aside for a while and then try re-writing later once you have starved it of enough attention that it's ready to play ball. With more time I might have solved the problem by finding something personal to write about - not me necessarily, any person would do (I know tons of secrets about ALL SORTS of famous people). As it is, most of it sounds like me filling up space until the writing is done, rather than being compelled to tell a story or explore a character that legitimately interests me. You don't have to get mad to write an angry song, but it does help to think about a time when you WERE mad and play off the details. Specificity makes things interesting, even if it's secret specificity that nobody else will understand but you. Sometimes especially if it's secret specificity - am I right, Charles R. in Santa Fe?

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

So when you're done sharing your thoughts on Thing A Week, will you share your thoughts on the songs from The Aftermath as well?

I think that's a fine idea. I may also extend it on through the songs from Artificial Heart if I'm feeling frisky.

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Thing a Week 49: Make You Cry

Sometime in this week I found this guitar figure that hypnotized me into playing it for about a hundred hours straight. I wish I had picked something that was a little easier to play, because it drove me crazy during the recording process. My poor, stubby little fingers! I don’t think I’ve done a song for Thing a Week that’s just guitar and vocals, and this one seemed particularly suited to it, so there you are. It’s another love song from a crazy person – this guy wants to win the girl so he can punish her for not loving him. I guess. He certainly seems confused and angry and sad. Do NOT hang out with him.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yeah hey, this one's a pretty song isn't it? People ask all the time, which comes first, words or music? In this case it was definitely music, I spent the week pacing around, playing and building this guitar part long before I had any idea what the song would be about. This style of guitar playing reminds me of You Ruined Everything, Drinking with You, and also So Far So Good: picky and folky, thumb working the bass notes. It's kind of a Bob Dylan via Paul Simon thing. It's very satisfying to me musically because I get to do everything - it's a real ARRANGEMENT, not just a bunch of strummy chords.

Guitar part is doubled and very hard to play, so it's no wonder it took me a while to record. I've done this live a few times with Paul and Storm, and my fingers are still not great at playing it. Bridge: three part harmony, all bluegrass-like, brings a tear to my eye it does. There's something about the sound of those simple harmonies that plugs right into my emotional ache center. All in all I'd say this is a pretty good effort.

This is one of many I've written in the category of "songs about assholes." It's a classic song writing trick - start from a moment where you were the wronged party, and then write from the perspective of the bad guy. "I broke your heart" is a lot more interesting than "You broke my heart." And it's perversely fun to try to get inside the head of someone who is clearly crazy, or evil, or otherwise out of balance. What this guy's doing doesn't even really make any sense, it's just an extremely unhealthy obsession that's probably super annoying to everyone involved. It's a twisted concept, and set in such a sweet sounding musical context it crosses wires in all sorts of pleasing ways.

This is very near the end of Thing a Week. I'm getting sad all over again.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 48: The Big Boom

Last weekend when I was staying with some friends in Pennsylvania, there was a very loud noise that woke me up. It was thunder. But it was crazy thunder – it seemed to last about a minute and a half, and it wasn’t a bang, it was this huge, diffuse roar. And after it stopped all the car alarms were going off. It sounded like the end of the world.

At least that’s what I thought when I sat bolt upright in bed and reached for my car keys and a weapon. My first thought, probably before I was fully awake, was that someone or something had scraped Philadelphia out of the Earth, and that I was going to have to grab some provisions, get in the car and head north. I don’t know why this would be my default explanation for a loud noise. I suppose it means I’m a little on edge.

At first this was about a loud boom that led to nothing, but it didn’t take long before I realized it would be better if it was about a loud boom that really did signify the end of the world. The Big Boom. And then I changed Philadelphia to Michigan because there are too many syllables in Philadelphia. The rest of it writes and records and mixes itself!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This track suffers quite a bit from my DIY home studio limitations. No drummer, that's the worst part. The loop libraries I have usually let me get pretty close to faking it, but I can really hear in this track that it's just canned drums, there's just no blood and guts in there. I'm also just generally not good at rocking onto tape. Of all the styles of music I tried to produce during Thing a Week, this was the hardest to get right - I think there's a lot more subtlety to the recording and mixing process with this genre than you might think. It also helps to have a real amp, and some people who can really play. I like to rock, I just don't always know how.

Things I like: the riff in the verse, the background vocals in the chorus, the minor major 7th chord at the end of the chorus, the bass guitar's solo moment at the end of the bridge/solo section.

Things I don't like: the general lack of testicles, the reappearance of one of my favorite harmonic crutches (the walkdown from F# minor, as seen in Chiron Beta Prime), the meh bridge/solo section (I need 16 bars of something, STAT!), and something about the vocal that I can't put my finger on but has a lot to do with me not knowing how to make rock music.

Lyrically it gets close, but I think there's just too much exposition, too much specificity and not enough evocative language. The guy is explaining too much, he should be more emotional and less able to express clearly what's going on. Or at least that would be one direction to try, it could just be a flawed concept.

I still remember that feeling of waking up that night, that thing where your body's awake but your brain is not, where you're all pre-mammalian impulse and you just want to GET OUT. I think it's what people refer to as night terrors, and it has happened to me only a couple of times. I was under some stress - great things were happening, but a lot was still hanging in the air somewhere between success and failure. Thing a Week One had just been put up at CDBaby, I was doing a bunch of Hodgman book tour stuff, and I was just setting up my very first all-me, out of town show in Seattle. It was also nearly the end of Thing a Week. I was tired of my weekly songwriting deadline, but I was also staring into an uncertain void at the end of it, riding right into a wall of clouds.

Which is not dissimilar to how I'm feeling now. Have I mentioned this new album? I have? Well, it's called Artificial Heart, and it's available for purchase on my website, and coming soon to all your favorite digital stores. I'm very proud of it, and I'm getting great feedback from lots of people, but it doesn't make me worry any less. The last few years have been pretty amazing, and the old songs know exactly what to do - these new ones are just babies. They could fall! On top of that, I'm still feeling a little stretched in the danger department, getting ready to travel around for three weeks with a band opening for They Might Be Giants (who do I think I am exactly?).

Fittingly for this post, this September leg of touring ends in Philadelphia - AS WILL THE WORLD!

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 47: I'm Your Moon

A few people suggested I do a song about Pluto, and I thought it was a fine idea. It was turning around in my head last week when the first line of the chorus came to me, as if from deep space.

As you certainly know by now, Pluto is not a planet anymore. Just yesterday the International Astronomical Union made it official by redefining “planet.” Pluto is a now considered a dwarf planet, along with a few other small, icy spherical things out there. Obviously very upsetting to Pluto. As you are also no doubt aware, Pluto’s moon Charon is kind of unusual: it’s about half the size of Pluto, which is pretty large for a moon. And it doesn’t orbit around Pluto, they actually orbit around each other, faces locked, like dancers. You wouldn’t be crazy to think of them as a double dwarf planet.

What I’m getting to is this: Charon sings this song to Pluto.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This is probably an even more impenetrable riddle song than Under the Pines. I forget because it's so obvious to me that it's about Pluto, but listening just now I realize there's not really any way you'd know that unless I told you. In spite of that, it's become an important part of the repertoire, especially in the live acoustic show.

One reason for that is that it's a better song. Actually in my opinion it's a little hacky - it's a "space song," you know, I can hear myself dipping into the bag of tricks for stuff that sounds like that. The Aadd2, the slathered reverb and delay. But the concept works so much better - this song expresses a more specific and complicated sentiment than what's going on with Leonard Nimoy and Bigfoot. So even if you don't know the story, it still comes across as meaningful and sweet and kind of deep. Also there's no style parody happening (just some slightly lazy writing and arranging). I give myself points for some interesting guitar playing instead of just strummy strummy all the time. And the way the bridge wheezes to a disorienting stop feels like a good choice. Less reverb was called for though, for sure.

This is one of those songs that a lot of people really latch onto. I just got a little weepy while listening to it because I thought of all the stories people have told me about singing it to their newborns and playing it at their weddings. I was just thinking about Pluto when I wrote it, but since it left my hands it's been infused with the essence of all these other relationships. And so now the Pluto thing really is just a metaphor, and when I hear it or sing it I think about all those real people feeling things. Which is awesome - I love hearing that songs of mine have taken up residence in people's emotional lives. That's the point of songs, isn't it?

I have no memory of writing this one either.

Listening just now, I realize that the lyrics and melody have evolved a little over the years of me playing this on the acoustic. Small changes, but they stick out - I think I'm more a fan of the acoustic version. That's one of the side effects of the breakneck pace of Thing a Week, where the writing happened mere hours away from the final, permanent recording. (Yeesh, just writing it out that way makes it sound like a bad idea.) There was never any time for a song to sit and breathe and grow up. I still think this is a good song and I'm very proud of it, but I think it had more to give.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

In your 2008 interview with Bry and Jinx from the forums, talking about opening for P&S, you said 'Now that I can play for an audience that has come to see me? I never want to do anything else. I just don't have the time or the energy to beat my head against the wall that is an audience that has never heard me before. If you're a fan, great! Come to the show. If you're not a fan, I can't help you.' So… with that in mind, what's it like opening for TMBG, and how long till they open for you? ;-)

I think that my experience would be very different if I were opening for a band that wasn't so close to my universe. Opening for TMBG has been great. For one thing, our fanbases overlap quite a bit, so there's always a vocal cluster of JoCo fans making me feel like people actually want me there. And many of those TMBG fans who aren't JoCo fans are also predisposed to BECOME JoCo fans, since, you know, TMBG and I are Pandora neighbors. So I do hope that expansion is one of the benefits of this opening band gambit, but I also am confident that we're all going to have a good time whether that happens or not.

They will never open for me, they are rock stars.

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Thing a Week 46: You Ruined Everything

I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling – I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it’s not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: This is one of those songs that I feel grateful to have found. It's by far the most directly personal song in Thing a Week, and probably in my entire catalog. I love it because it expresses how I really feel about this very important part of my life without ducking for cover cover behind a giant squid or a mad scientist character. It's a love letter to my kids, one that I think has enough emotional complexity in it that they'll understand it over and over again in different ways as they get older. Or not. My daughter recently asked me, "Daddy, is there a different kind of ruined?" Well yeah, sort of.

Personal songs feel perilous to me. It's scary to reveal what I think and feel about something, even in conversation with a single person, let alone with the whole internet. There's the risk that I'll reveal something about myself that I think is universal, and instead everyone will finally know what a monster I am. That doesn't seem to be the case with this one - I've heard from lots of parents that this hits pretty close to home, and even from some non parents who find that this describes their romantic relationships pretty well. Those fears aside, I find it very hard to say honest things about myself in a song without it sounding like the sappy, maudlin, navel gazing stuff I used to write in high school. Somehow I got away with it here, but usually if you describe how you feel about something and then just make it a song lyric, it stinks. That's why it's often easier and somehow MORE honest to start with an imaginary point of view and let your true self sneak in.

I have no memory of writing this song.

If I have any regrets, it's that I didn't just do a plain old acoustic/vocal recording. I've been performing it live that way for years, and it just works better that way. It's a simple song, and it communicates just fine without any bells and whistles. I like tucking it away at the end of the set, a little quiet moment when I can close my eyes and think about my kids, far away, fast asleep in Brooklyn.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 45: Mr. Fancy Pants

I tried to write something else, believe me. But this stupid line about Mr. Fancy Pants having the fanciest pants just wouldn’t get out of my head, so I was forced to follow it through to whatever this is. I’ll warn you, it’s a short one. A nice little amuse bouche (but for your ears). Even so I kind of like it – some kind of strange morality lesson about beating Mr. Fancy Pants at his own game. Or something. Anyways!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS:

I remember a moment from this week when I was riding my bike around Prospect Park with the first line of this song stuck in my head, and wishing it would leave so I could get to work on WRITING SOMETHING. I would often ride when I needed to clear my head and find a new idea. I found that if I put my body into some kind of autopilot mode - riding, walking, driving - it would sometimes occupy just enough of my brain's bandwidth to shut off the censors, and then something would bubble up. It didn't always work, and in this case I ended up right where I started, with the same dumb non-idea I was trying to escape.

As it turns out, this song was a good one, though you never could have guessed. All I had was a bouncy feel, a not-really-rhyming line about pants, and an otherwise empty idea bin. I decided to try writing without a subject, just following the words where they led. In this case they led back to pants. It's not about anything really, though it certainly pretends to be. I like how it leaves you at the end, with a hollow victory over who knows what, not really knowing how you're supposed to feel or who the villain was.

I love the chords in the bridge. They're something I found more with my fingers than with my brain. It's almost like this song was generated by the non-thinking parts of me, by the systems level utilities - sitting down and typing gibberish until something gets traction. Strangely, it was the first time I tried this technique during Thing a Week, and I wish I had surrendered to it earlier. I relied on it quite a bit for this new album, and it often led to much more honest and personal expression than I could have gotten to otherwise. It's very hard to write about nothing for very long, and the real stuff sneaks out of you when you're not looking.

I was certainly thinking of They Might Be Giants once I got to the recording process - accordion plus electric guitar, keep it short and sweet, make it fun. I wanted it to sound like a marching band falling down some stairs. Of course the real magic in this song wasn't released until I began performing it live on the Zendrum, at which point I was finally able to get to how it really sounded in my head when I first found it, which is to say "insane and kind of about pants."

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 44: Big Bad World One

Enough with the bigfoots and zombies, this one is pretty straightforward subject matter. The headline is “Sadsack Can’t Find Love,” which is just about as classic as it gets. I have spent more time than I would like to admit hanging out by the food table at parties, because it makes me look like I’m busy with something instead of just afraid to talk to anybody.

I like the way the title phrase sounds out of context – it seems like maybe it might mean something, but you can’t really say what. And I’m incredibly relieved to have broken out of the endless series of sad songs in the key of D that I appear to have been working on. It feels nice to do something a little different. This one’s in A, D and G! Crazy!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Right on. I love this song. Many classic JoCo tricks in there, but somehow it all adds up to something that sounds pretty fresh to me. Put down a nice crispy bed of doubled acoustic guitars and your pop song will sleep comfortably, that's for sure. Our old friend the m7b5 chord is there (surprise!) in the kicker line of the chorus ("me zero"), but it's not in the same role it usually is when I deploy it - I don't have the patience right now to figure out what it's doing there exactly, it's probably best understood a substitution for something else. Doesn't matter, it's delicious!

(Requisite comment about the mix/arrangement: not enough dynamic range. Oh well.)

There's a lot about this song I don't quite get harmonically. It starts with this AM7 suspension thing (stolen from Code Monkey chorus, later redecorated for Pull the String) that's weirdly ambiguous - it's actually kind of an E chord played over A. By the end of the first line of the verse we've sort of shifted to D as the tonal center. And then in the prechorus we just bust into a section in G like it's nothing. And then of course that great moment at the end of the bridge where the harmonies hold over the change from a Cadd6 to that AM7 thing. I just love all that wandering. There's probably some nice music theory that can "explain" all this jumping around any number of ways (I mean, probably?), but what I like about it's weird, but it's still nice and pop-friendly. It's rare that I sit down to strum on a guitar and come up with something that feels new.

The prechorus was a little atom that floated around in my ideas folder for a long time before this song got written, and it just kind of got sucked up into this song. Aside from that fact, I remember almost nothing about writing this one. I just remember how I felt in those weeks. I was out on the edge. Every song was a struggle that started with complete despair. I made decisions quickly and didn't look back. I had no idea if what I was doing was good or not.

There were a couple of moments during the end of the writing process for this new album where I felt like that - and it felt good in that, "I'm running a triathalon, ow!" way - all tapped out and still somehow things coming out of me. Like getting food poisoning. I can't possibly have anything left in there, can I? And then too I found the same strange room that I always forget about, the room where all the good songs are. Every time I find myself in that room I think "Well hmm, this is quite nice all these good songs lying around, why don't I come here all the time?" It's just that it takes an awful lot of effort and pain to get there.

The songs from this part of Thing a Week are my favorites, I think largely because of their mysterious origins. They came from outer space. They happened during the stretch when I was most able to forget about myself. Maybe I like them because they don't feel like they're mine.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 43: Under the Pines

Not many people know this, but when Leonard Nimoy did the Bigfoot episode of “In Search Of…” he and the creature hooked up one night and had this crazy fling. These kinds of things never end well, but Bigfoot in particular is a bit of a cad anyway (being mostly wild animal). As you might imagine, Leonard Nimoy came out of the experience somewhat worse for wear.

I’m almost sure that I have stolen this melody from somewhere, or maybe parts of it from lots of places, it sounds very familiar to me. And the bassline – hello? Blue Bayou? At first this was just a “bigfoot broke my heart” song, but I wasn’t getting a lot of traction. It wasn’t until I realized that it was Leonard Nimoy talking that it came together for me. There are just a couple of subtle references to Spock in there, and bigfoot’s name is never mentioned, so if you’re haven’t read this explanation you are either confused, or blissfully unaware that it’s about Bigfoot and Leonard Nimoy. Godspeed.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Ah, a classic Thursday desperation song. Never in a million years would I have TRIED to write this song, rather I only would have ALLOWED it to happen in the absence of any other alternative.

Not that it's so terrible. I actually think this one deserved a better place in JoCo history than it got. I like the melody, it's simple but pretty solidly built. There are some nice moments in the lyrics, in particular I love the "bag of suet" joke, and I love the entirety of the third verse. In terms of solving the puzzle (describing a love affair between Bigfoot and Leonard Nimoy without mentioning either one) it succeeds very well. Here are the problems:

Arrangement - pfft. Not a lot there. It starts from style parody, which is always a dangerous game, especially when you veer away from the style and just start throwing stuff at the wall without caring if it sticks. The terrible chorus guitar in the choruses and those background vocals just don't make sense to me, and they're there only because I didn't come up with anything else to fill the space. At the end of the day I really just copped a bassline.

Subtlety - almost nobody who hears this song figures out that it's about Bigfoot and Leonard Nimoy. It's too clever by half. I can't imagine what you would think of this song if you didn't know what it was about. It would just seem bizarre, unfunny, and not very interesting.

Goofballism - obviously I am trapped by this a lot. It's rare to come across a song that is completely goofy and still emotionally stirring enough to matter to someone. Many would say that's my wheelhouse, and in fact I just wrote myself a new bio in which I claimed that it was. I frequently try for that combination, and it feels wonderful when I hit it right, but the truth is I fail more often than not. When you write about goofy things, you're giving all the other songs in the world a head start. I failed to back this one up with much of anything, and I think that's why it fails to achieve liftoff.

To be clear, I am not anti-goofball. There's nothing wrong with funny music, I don't care what you say. I listened to Weird Al's latest album Alpocalypse and was reminded that while there's a ton of funny music out there, only a small fraction of it is done really well. Weird Al is the undisputed champion, and he elevates the genre like nobody else because he's got a great musical brain and has honed the hell out of his craft.

It doesn't matter what kind of music you're doing, death metal or novelty songs, it has to be honest and it has to be great.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 42: Creepy Doll

I don’t know what’s going on with this one, I just decided earlier this week that it was time to write a song about a creepy doll. I was thinking about various 70s horror movies that scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. Back then you didn’t need to torture people with chainsaws and drills to make a scary movie, it was enough just to have a doll that kept showing up. Or maybe a clown. I couldn’t keep a straight face though, somewhere in the middle of the song the doll just becomes not so much creepy as annoying. And before you post it in the comments, yes I know that it sounds like Bacteria in the beginning – it’s the same Glock sound and the same key, and kind of the same music. Sue me. We’re on song number 42 here people…

Also, just a little merch plug: I’ve just added T-shirts for “Re: Your Brains” to my CafePress store. The image is the song lyrics typed in memo form decorated with a delightful blood spatter. Buy zombies, buy!

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yes, well, victory of course. This has become an important part of the repertoire. I didn't know it at the time obviously, you never do. As a recording I don't think it's super great - I find it too slow, though part of that is because I've been playing it a lot faster live. And I wrote beyond my abilities on the guitar. I can imagine it being a lot more awesome when played by someone who can really play. Some nice elements in there I guess, though they sound a little pat to me now. I was already bracing myself for criticism about using the same spooky music box trick I used in Bacteria (and would later use in Still Alive). The reverse thing at the end is cool, but I had a devil of a time getting it to smoothly transition from the forward version to the reversed version.

Song-wise, I think it's a good one. The chord progression sounds kind of unique to me, it wanders and is spooky, but doesn't really hit you over the head with the usual spooky music tricks. And it's funny, but it has enough subtlety to it that it doesn't get too annoying. I do love the turn when you realize the doll is just kind of irritating. And the twist at the end, while standard in this genre, feels CORRECT anyway. I was thinking about that Stephen King story with the wind-up monkey, and I was thinking of the doll in Trilogy of Terror, and probably a couple other things I can't remember.

That line about "if you really need that much honey" actually comes from my past. I had a girlfriend in high school whose Dad had a reputation in the family for being something of a type-A personality, and it's true, he was absolutely nuts about turning lights off, not wasting food, and saving money. For some reason he bought powdered milk, mixed it up, and then served that to his family in equal proportions with regular whole milk - WHY? Nobody knows. He was the kind of guy who would gingerly slide the turn signal arm into place when he turned on the blinker, because he wanted the switch to last a long time. He drove everyone crazy. There was a framed photo somewhere in the house of him posed and smiling in a suit. His son, my girlfriend's older brother, had taped a little comic-style talk bubble to it that said "Hey! Do you really need that much jelly?" I thought it was a hilarious character assassination, so I stole it for this.

It's all the little secrets you have about where things come from that make you feel a little fraudulent sometimes. The audience see a magic trick, but I see a box with a trap door in it that I bought at the magic store. I know that's how everybody works, because I've seen bits of my life in things that my friends have created. It feels good, like a little secret shout out. And then I wonder about this particular reference. Does that family remember that joke as well as I do? And have they heard this song and did they recognize it?

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 41: Seahorse

I was thinking about how with seahorses, the males are the ones who carry the fertilized eggs until they hatch. And then of course I started thinking of a sad seahorse, whose female had left him alone to care for the kids – AGAIN. I’m pretty sure this is not actually the way things really are for seahorses. But if it was, you know, this song would make sense.

I can’t believe we’re on Thing a Week V.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Goink! Thing a Week V? Apparently I still hadn't done the math to figure out the factors of 52. Ten is not a factor of 52, that's sort of obvious. I guess I was just thinking that albums were ten songs long? Which they're not. Who knows!

I keep reviewing the other blog posts chronologically close to the original Thing a Week one, and around here is where I can recognize the beginnings of me becoming too busy to blog properly. I was falling behind on everything, and it has stayed that way ever since. One of the first things to go was my ability to keep on top of things that people were sending me - stuff they made, stuff they noticed that was cool or stuff they found that was about me. Early on when I wasn't getting much of these, I had the time to lavish attention on them in a way that they deserved. I still find it remarkable that anybody cares, and I still treasure every little drawing, video, story, half-pony half-monkey monster that comes across my radar. Unfortunately if I spent as much time studying and celebrating them as I wanted to, I would: 1) have no time to make music, and 2) be absorbed into my own ego so completely that the heat from my self-love would explode our solar system. Lately I've been so busy falling behind on things that I don't even have the mind space for Twitter - TWITTER! Who doesn't have time for Twitter?

But hey, listen to the mix on this song would you? Not too shabby. Drum loop that's not too egregiously out of place, those lush vocals in the chorus (the patented JoCo doubled, hard-panned SPREAD (not actually patented, or mine)). What's nice about it is that it hangs together as a whole really well - usually I can hear all the little individual parts sticking out, but this sounds pleasantly cohesive to me. Bassline in the verses: aces. Edie Brickell tremolo guitar in the left channel: you're welcome. And my favorite, the little rush at the end of the chorus, which I think is a guitar strum run backwards.

The song is pretty. A fine melody, maybe not a lot of meat in the lyrics. I was consciously trying to write simply, to write Hemingway lyrics. I remember thinking it would be a challenge to use all one-syllable words. Of course by making this about a Seahorse, I failed out of the gate, but it was a nice guiding principle. And it's sweet, if a little fluffy and inconsequential.

The bridge shares some DNA with the B-section of the verses from "I Crush Everything." I can't remember the precise details anymore, but I think I remember that line about the waves above going up and down trying to sneak its way into "Crush." Or maybe it was the other way around? Either way, two songs about sad sea creatures:they're bound to sound like siblings.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 40: SkyMall

Ah, the joys of travel. I actually enjoy browsing the SkyMall – never mind the delicious array of products for the person who already owns all the world’s products; the copy alone is worth the price of admission, which is zero, since Skymall is free. Look into it.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Um, excuse me, that is a fantastic intro - that little McCartney bass riff right before all the other instruments is CANDY. I was bracing myself for this recording to be not so good, but it's pretty decent actually. Maybe a little too busy an arrangement, but I'm not quite sure how I pulled off such a totally believable guitar rock thing. I feel like that was an ongoing struggle through that year, one of my weaknesses that the process really hammered on until it was much less of a weakness. I think that by this time of the year I had figured it out pretty well. And hey, check out that bridge! The lyrics there crack me up, it's an interesting but not jarring little harmonic shift, and the arrangement hits all the right spots for me with the delay on the vocal and the washy wall of sound.

I could have skipped that guitar solo. It's not terrible, but it's also not necessary. If I were to do this one today I'd take the bridge through some kind of fall apart moment and break the whole thing way down for the start of verse 3. I'm a fan of the verse 3 break down.

I also wish for a little more depth in the lyrics. I mean, the thing is about a guy who likes SkyMall, so I guess what are you gonna do? I fell into the trap of "list of ridiculous SkyMall items" in verse 2, but I'd say that failing is mitigated by the line about the Santa in which (in my mind anyway) the guy is talking to himself in the voice of SkyMall copy, as if he's fallen completely under its sway. It's a subtle thing, but I like it.

Really what would be excellent is if I could have gotten to a little more emotion. This guy's on the road all the time, and he's obviously got someone at home that he misses. "O'Hare is nice this time of year" is a pretty sad line when you think about it. And judging from my breathy vocal performance in that verse I was trying to convey a little sadness there. And I find a LOT of tragedy in the first line of verse 3 "I love you best when I'm away." But all that gets swept away by the joke that the real reason he's excited to get home is that he can't wait to get his hands on the wine-holding bear statue. Honka honka! Again, the song is called SkyMall, it's going to pull you in that direction pretty hard.

I don't think I had a ton of travel under my belt at this point in the year, so maybe I hadn't found that particular source of sadness yet. I had started doing a little touring, and of course having done long stretches with Hodgman on his book tour I had a taste of it. I always try to keep my tours as short as possible, because long trips tend to make me miserable. It's a combination of highs and lows - the incredible rush and joy of playing for a crowd of people, alternating with large chunks of time waiting around, driving in vans, or counting Tshirts in crappy hotel rooms. It's weirdly dehumanizing. I sometimes feel like pieces of my personality start to fall away - I go off twitter, I fail to contact friends that I have in town for the standard, unsatisfying rushed meal and catch-up conversation. And of course I miss my family and my home and all my stuff. SkyMall really isn't that much of a comfort. I wish I were still young enough to just do drugs all the time - I get why that's a thing in the rock and roll biz.

In September I'll have a new record out and will be opening for They Might Be Giants for a stretch of over three weeks. That's the longest I will ever have been out, and I'm curious to see to what extent I go to pieces. I'll have a lot of company of course - my own band, plus all the TMBG guys who I know pretty well, so I'm certain it will be really fun. TMBG are serious, hard-working road warriors, and some of the people in that band have been dealing with long tours away from family for years and years, so maybe I'll pick up some tips (or perhaps a couple of these).

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 39: Pizza Day

In my school, it was Friday. The pizza wasn’t any good at all, but you can’t really argue with pizza at school can you?

Those of you who’ve spoken to me in the last 24 hours may be surprised that there’s a song here – until about 2:00 this afternoon I had pretty much nothing. I was all ready to blow it off and go play some tennis when this came to me. The music is an idea that’s been floating around in my head forever, but the sad guy singing about pizza was one of those things that just bubbled up from somewhere. It’s by necessity a pretty simple structure and arrangement, but I kind of like it that way. It’s economical. And recording it also felt very old school for some reason, reminded me of high school, sitting in my room at home with a four track cassette and a chorus pedal. And maybe a piece of pizza.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: One of the "bolt from the blue" songs, born of desperation and despair. I'm just now remembering that originally this melody had different lyrics: it was a love song for Dana Scully. No, I can't remember them, and I wouldn't share them with you if I could because they obviously were not good enough to graduate to song-dom. Even then it felt a little too on the nose.

Jeez, this one is a heartbreaker, it makes me really sad. The arrangement could use some work (duh, it was done in two hours), but those vocals at the end of the chorus are great. Still love the concept, though I probably could have eased up a little in verse two - one of the things I think I've learned how to do a lot better is write AROUND what I want to say instead of just saying it. There is certainly a bit of distance for this guy, he never says "me" or "I", and that works pretty well. I do think the lyrics could be stronger if he didn't directly address what he's really worried about in verse two. Of course there's something honest and simple about him talking about lunch tables and wanting it all to be over, but I often find that the knife twists more painfully when you don't see it coming. Gah, I can picture this kid sitting alone with his little slice of pizza, make it stop.

And you know, I wasn't the kind of kid in school who didn't have friends at lunch, so I don't know why it still hurts me so much to think of this character. In a general sense I was definitely a nerd. I had buck teeth, I liked math, I was pals with the teachers, but various class clown techniques kept my head above water. And then in junior high, one day I woke up and realized I was a gawky kid with the wrong clothes and the wrong haircut and a sweaty underarm problem and ridiculous giant glasses. I had a good friend who had made it across the barriers, maybe had always been there somehow, and I went to great efforts to model myself after him in all the right ways. I spent a couple years feeling extremely uncomfortable all the time about how I looked and moved and acted, and somewhere in there found my way to contact lenses and confidence. By high school I had figured out how to pass as a cool kid, though I was always terribly afraid someone would discover my secret, put glasses on me, and punch me in them.

But those kids. I remember their names still, sometimes even the odd way they walked or the twitchy thing they did with their eyes when they were socially panicked. The super smart kids who talked funny. The kids who really did sit alone, who really had no friends at all. I hope I was nice to them, I always tried to be a nice to everyone, but I bet I was a jerk sometimes. I certainly didn't go out of my way to sit with them at lunch. And I still remember how it felt before I put on my cool kid skin, the blind fear that came with certain situations - the AWFUL feeling of being different and having someone call attention to it. That's the worst thing I can imagine, having to slog all through your school years feeling that way. I'm glad I'm a super cool rock star now with no insecurities.

Oh, and I just got this, it's about Friday isn't it? Because of course at this point I was done with Fridays. That was by now the saddest day of the week for me because I was tired, and empty, and slowly shambling week by week toward the day when I could stop writing dumb songs.

This is the last song on Thing a Week Three, and this is where it starts to get really good.

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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Thing a Week 38: Drinking With You

I don’t know what it is with me and the office crushes – I haven’t had a job in almost a year so you know, it hasn’t really come up. But I find them very sweet, I think because offices are a lot like high school, which is the best time to have a crush. Except when you have an office crush, you are most likely old enough to drink, and so you can go out and get drunk with your crushee, which is also the best.

I am sensitive to the fact that some might misconstrue this song to be not so much a “sweet love song” and more a “pro-date-rape” song. This is not what I mean. I’m talking about that night long after the two of you both know very well what is going on but haven’t acted on it, and you make this mutual but kind of secret decision to “go out for drinks” – and you’re playing it cool on the outside but inside you’re jumping up and down and doing a one-person conga line singing “Going out for dri-hinks! Going out for dri-hinks!”

If you aren’t old enough to drink, don’t go out for drinks with your crush. It’s really not that awesome. Stay in school kids.

PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yes, yes, yes. To my mind this is a nearly unqualified success - still love the song, not that embarrassed by the mix. I managed to not ruin this by over producing it. I even find the solo to be appropriate, interesting, and dare I say, well-executed (Ebow, baby). This kind of picky acoustic arrangement with the moving bassline is a trick I first discovered in "So Far, So Good" which was week 19. But the chord progression feels pretty fresh to me, there's even some stuff in there that I'm not exactly sure what it is. I wrote the guitar part first, and it was one of those songs where I just played it and played it a million times before I knew what it was about. I don't recall where the lyrics started coming to me, but my guess is that it was the kicker line in the chorus, "It'd be nice to go out drinking with you."

And that's a good line, if I do say so myself. It's a concept I haven't heard before in a love song, not in such a sweet setting anyway, and it feels slightly dangerous - like you shouldn't talk about that feeling, and anyway if you try you'll probably screw it up. You can hear my backpedaling in the blog post I wrote at the time. But it's a real thing, at least it was for me back when I used to go out of the house after 6 PM. My wife and I never worked together, but the beginning of our romantic involvement (we were friends for a long time first) had a lot to do with drinking together at bars in big groups of friends. And that line about discreetly sharing a cab home comes from that period of time when we hadn't yet gone public to our social circle. Those hours at the end of an already too long evening, trying to outlast everyone else so you can leave together without them noticing that you're leaving together - that's still my most direct nostalgic connection to my mid 20's, and what passed for romance in New York City in those days.

I forget how directly I lift from my own life sometimes, and usually I don't notice that I'm doing it. That seems crazy because of course, it's me inside my head all the time. How did I trick myself into thinking I was writing about some imaginary office crush while not noticing until years later (today actually, just now) that I was writing a love song to my wife? It's such a complete and total deception - when exactly did I stop paying attention to what I was thinking?

It's a strange headspace, and I've found that I can most easily get there by writing when I really don't feel like writing - 38 weeks of Thing a Week did the trick in this case. I'm sad that I have to write a song, but here I go. Shuffle sad over to sentimental, and then start making stuff up and see where it leads. It's a kind of emotionally directed free association, and it's almost pathetic how well it works once the right switches get flipped on. Because if you're doing it right, free association is not really "free" at all. In fact it might be the only time you're ever writing as YOU, because for once, you've taken your dumb, scared, self-hating self out of the equation. Something else takes over then, and it doesn't feel like it's you. There's another voice in your head, and you are merely listening to it and repeating what it says.

This is that feeling of being directed by the muse, the kind of writing you can't remember afterwards, and that somehow makes an end run around all your stupid emotional sentries and gets to something resonant and true. If I had set out to write a love song about my wife, I never in a million years would have started with the sentiment that I liked getting drunk with her back in 1995. I sure did though...

You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.

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