A few days ago I had to opportunity to do a phone interview with “geek culture” music legend Jonathan Coulton. Whether singing about zombies, robots, or bacteria, Coulton’s witty and scifi oriented songs have become hugely popular, so much so that Coulton’s music is now used for the opening of the G4 show CODE MONKEYS and the popular and catchy theme song from the video game PORTAL. Check out the interview below.
Rebekah Mckendry/FANGORIA- I first became really familiar with your work because of the PORTAL song and recently I saw you again when you did the live Riff Track performance. So let me start by asking you how you got involved with Riff Tracks?
Jonathan- I’ve been a fan of theirs for a long time, actually. I used to watch MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. I was doing a show in San Diego which is where Mike Nelson lived. These guys I travel and tour with, these musicians, named Paul and Storm, very funny singer songwriters, somehow got in touch with Mike Nelson and let him know that we were in town and that we were fans. Bill Corbet was there and Mike Nelson also, and we met them afterwards and hung out a little bit and that was how I first met them. And then we’ve kept in touch since then, and when they were doing the Riff Track thing, then they called me up and asked if I wanted to be a part of it.
R- What other current projects do you have going on right now?
J- Currently I have out the concert DVD called BEST. CONCERT. EVER. that is a show that I did in San Francisco, the first official live material that I’ve released because, you know, the much last couple of years of my life have been about figuring out how to be a live performing musician which is something I’ve never really had a great deal of experience with until recently, so aside from that, I have various ongoing things. I’m working on getting a number of my songs into the game ROCK BAND right now.
R – You know under your Wikipedia page it describes you as “rock geek folk”. So I was wondering if you could just briefly tell us a little bit about your background, and how you came to be defined as “rock geek folk”.
J- Well you know there are two main interests in my life. One of them is science, the other one is music. You know, I’ve always been really interested in putting stuff together and taking stuff apart and knowing how things work and all that . I’ve been a nerd all my life. I’ve had nerdy interests all my life. I also like writing songs, and I think there is something about the way I’ve approached songwriting that taps into that same science brain. You know for me its about construction and puzzle solving and that sort of thing. As a result, I end up writing all these songs about things like zombies and robots and monkeys and giant squids and math and planets and seahorses. And you know, my musical influences are kind of seventies soft rock and “folkie” stuff, so you mix all that up together and you get the three words - geek folk rock - which appear in many different orders, but I think they all sort of apply. You know as most musicians will tell you, it’s very hard to come up with a way of describing their music. That’s the question everybody really hates, “What kind of music do you do?” I actually don’t have to do that because there is Wikipedia to decide that for me.
R- Now you play like six different instruments right? I’ve heard guitar, bass, harmonica, accordion, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and glockenspiel, and there are some others right? Where on earth did you learn to play all those?
J- Well, once you’ve learned to play the guitar and the piano that opens up a lot of avenues to other instruments. You know all those stringed instruments are relatively similar. They’re tuned in a different way but your muscles work the same. So once you play one of them you can kind of figure out a little bit of what to do on the other ones. I actually took bluegrass banjo lessons for a while because I was just really interested in that music, and this is generally how I approach learning an instrument - to learn just enough so I can fake it, and then I stop learning . So the nice thing about doing all of your recording at home in your own studio on a computer is that you have unlimited time to get a part just right, and you can also use the computer to cheat in all sorts of ways, you know cutting and pasting and that sort of thing. So I wouldn’t describe myself as a really competent player of all those things, but I can make them make sounds that people recognize as those instruments
R – Now can you tell us a little bit about CODE MONKEYS and your song that they use for the opening? I know a lot of our staff our huge fans of the show. How did you get involved with them?
J – I used to write software for a living . I left that job at the end of 2005 and I had all this time on my hands so I started doing this project called “Thing a Week” where I would release a new song every Friday. I did that for a year, and it was sort of the beginning of my trail to Internet stardom. And that song was maybe about half-way through that year of song-writing, and it was a personal, but not completely factually, autobiographical version of what it was like to write software for a living, and kind of had its own life on the Internet. It spoke to a lot of people, I think, many of them who were software writers, but many who were not. It seems every line of work has a monkey position you can occupy if you like. And then they were doing this animated show, and they approached me and asked if they could use the song as the theme, I guess because the titles were the same.
R- One of the things I’ve notice about CODE MONKEYS and a lot of your other songs is that there is the great duality in meaning, where at first it seems like this wonderful little witty examination of a computer programmer, but it’s got this really sensitive soft side that emerges at the end, and a lot of your songs seem to have that. Do you intentionally look to create a dual meaning into your songs?
J– Yea, I do like that multi-layered kind of song. Specifically, I’m a fan of songs that sound like they’re really up-beat and catchy, but are actually very sad. I don’t know why. There’s something I love about that moment of surprise you get when you listen the third or fourth or fifth time and you realize what the song is about and “Oh my god, that’s really interesting” or “That’s really sad.” So yea, I like that kind of listening experience. So it’s something for me to try to create that.
R. – Now another topic that you use in your songs, that we of course are very found of are zombies. Can you tell us a little about “RE: YOUR BRAINS”.
J – Yea, it takes the form of a memo, I suppose. It’s from one co-worker to another, except the writer of the memo is a zombie. And the receiver of the memo is a human, held up in some sort of safe place, probably a mall. I thought it was funny to have a zombie speak in this sort of corporate office lingo that everybody seems to fall into. You know, having worked in an office for almost 10 years, I was always amused by the things that would come out of my mouth, the phrases, these stock phrases that everybody uses, the language of business, and it’s often kind of meaningless, and that’s why people use it. It’s a safe kind of language. So I thought it would be amusing to have a character who was a zombie, who had this very base need , this requirement, for the love of eating human brains, but also was sort of very eloquent and moreover would speak in this ridiculously distant and empty office-speak. So that was the starting point for that song.
R- Can you tell us a little bit about what it’s like writing the soundtrack song for a video game? How did you start developing your ideas for the PORTAL song which has become so popular?
J – Well, they approached me and asked if I wanted to write the music for them, and I said, “yes, please,” because I was a huge fan of their game. I went to their offices and got to play the early version of the game, and sat with the developers and the writers and you know, we quickly realized that we had this shared sensibility in terms of character. You know the character of Glados in this video game. She’s a murderess with artificial intelligence. And she murders not because she’s mean, but because she sort of thinks that’s what she needs to do. It’s part of her job. And in a way that’s what makes her so tragic a character is that she’s doing terrible things but she doesn’t really know that they’re terrible. And she’s also very passive-aggressive. Plus the other thing that makes you really feel for her is that she’s trying to manipulate you, but she’s not very good at it because she’s a computer. So you have this character of the monster who can’t help but be a monster because they are a monster and that’s sad. I spoke with the writers a great deal about what the character was like, and what she would be feeling at the end of the game, and what she might want to talk about, and what the back story was, and then I just sort of went away and wrote it. I wrote one version, and they had a couple of suggestions for lyric tweaks. But really no big changes.
Then it went into the game, just like that.
R –There’s one thing I absolutely love about your approach to your work, and that is you encourage a lot of other people to use your material. How do you approach this, the allowing of others to appropriate your stuff?
J – Two things really. On the one hand, you can look at it kind of cynically and say, “Its free advertising for me.” And this is true. There are all these little tiny sub-networks of people on the Internet who have common interests. And talk to each other all the time, and share things with each other all the time. For me, to let my music be reused means the people in these little tiny sub-networks are going to take it and make something new of it and share it with all their friends. But in a larger sense, there’s something to the idea that art is really about theft, and more and more at least in the digital realm. The way we create things is to take other things and cut them into pieces and re-use them, whether you’re talking about mash-up or funny photo shop things or LOL Cats... it’s all about these ideas, this soup of ideas, bubbling and colliding and combining and splitting off. It’s just a really beautiful thing, and to me it is at the very root of what it is to be a creative person. So to participate in that, and allow my music to be a part of that, just seems to be the most natural thing in the world to me.
R – So what are some of your fave horror movies?
J – THE EXORCIST is still one of the scariest movies I have ever seen.
R- You’d be surprised just how many people tell us that.
J. – Yea, maybe because I saw it when I was far too young to be seeing it, but it scared the crap out of me. It was pretty scary, and at the time I had younger siblings who were babies, so they would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and I was sure they were possessed. It was the only explanation that made any sense to me. And then, I’m not sure, but I think it’s classified as a horror movie- ALIEN is such a terrific potboiler of a movie. It starts, and it just keeps going, and it ratchets up tension in a really great way. And it’s another huge favorite of mine. If it’s on television, I must watch it.
R. And for plugs- Where can fans find you? Where are your next concert appearances? What should we be checking out?
J- My website is : jonathancolton.com
You can listen to everything for free there, but I also hope that you buy it.
The DV and audio CD is called BEST. CONCERT. EVER.
That is the thing that is out now.
Song – “Skull Crusher Mountain” – and “Still Alive” are both in ROCK BAND.
Coming soon – song – read your brains
Rebekah Mckendry/FANGORIA- I first became really familiar with your work because of the PORTAL song and recently I saw you again when you did the live Riff Track performance. So let me start by asking you how you got involved with Riff Tracks?
Jonathan- I’ve been a fan of theirs for a long time, actually. I used to watch MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. I was doing a show in San Diego which is where Mike Nelson lived. These guys I travel and tour with, these musicians, named Paul and Storm, very funny singer songwriters, somehow got in touch with Mike Nelson and let him know that we were in town and that we were fans. Bill Corbet was there and Mike Nelson also, and we met them afterwards and hung out a little bit and that was how I first met them. And then we’ve kept in touch since then, and when they were doing the Riff Track thing, then they called me up and asked if I wanted to be a part of it.
R- What other current projects do you have going on right now?
J- Currently I have out the concert DVD called BEST. CONCERT. EVER. that is a show that I did in San Francisco, the first official live material that I’ve released because, you know, the much last couple of years of my life have been about figuring out how to be a live performing musician which is something I’ve never really had a great deal of experience with until recently, so aside from that, I have various ongoing things. I’m working on getting a number of my songs into the game ROCK BAND right now.
R – You know under your Wikipedia page it describes you as “rock geek folk”. So I was wondering if you could just briefly tell us a little bit about your background, and how you came to be defined as “rock geek folk”.
J- Well you know there are two main interests in my life. One of them is science, the other one is music. You know, I’ve always been really interested in putting stuff together and taking stuff apart and knowing how things work and all that . I’ve been a nerd all my life. I’ve had nerdy interests all my life. I also like writing songs, and I think there is something about the way I’ve approached songwriting that taps into that same science brain. You know for me its about construction and puzzle solving and that sort of thing. As a result, I end up writing all these songs about things like zombies and robots and monkeys and giant squids and math and planets and seahorses. And you know, my musical influences are kind of seventies soft rock and “folkie” stuff, so you mix all that up together and you get the three words - geek folk rock - which appear in many different orders, but I think they all sort of apply. You know as most musicians will tell you, it’s very hard to come up with a way of describing their music. That’s the question everybody really hates, “What kind of music do you do?” I actually don’t have to do that because there is Wikipedia to decide that for me.
R- Now you play like six different instruments right? I’ve heard guitar, bass, harmonica, accordion, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and glockenspiel, and there are some others right? Where on earth did you learn to play all those?
J- Well, once you’ve learned to play the guitar and the piano that opens up a lot of avenues to other instruments. You know all those stringed instruments are relatively similar. They’re tuned in a different way but your muscles work the same. So once you play one of them you can kind of figure out a little bit of what to do on the other ones. I actually took bluegrass banjo lessons for a while because I was just really interested in that music, and this is generally how I approach learning an instrument - to learn just enough so I can fake it, and then I stop learning . So the nice thing about doing all of your recording at home in your own studio on a computer is that you have unlimited time to get a part just right, and you can also use the computer to cheat in all sorts of ways, you know cutting and pasting and that sort of thing. So I wouldn’t describe myself as a really competent player of all those things, but I can make them make sounds that people recognize as those instruments
R – Now can you tell us a little bit about CODE MONKEYS and your song that they use for the opening? I know a lot of our staff our huge fans of the show. How did you get involved with them?
J – I used to write software for a living . I left that job at the end of 2005 and I had all this time on my hands so I started doing this project called “Thing a Week” where I would release a new song every Friday. I did that for a year, and it was sort of the beginning of my trail to Internet stardom. And that song was maybe about half-way through that year of song-writing, and it was a personal, but not completely factually, autobiographical version of what it was like to write software for a living, and kind of had its own life on the Internet. It spoke to a lot of people, I think, many of them who were software writers, but many who were not. It seems every line of work has a monkey position you can occupy if you like. And then they were doing this animated show, and they approached me and asked if they could use the song as the theme, I guess because the titles were the same.
R- One of the things I’ve notice about CODE MONKEYS and a lot of your other songs is that there is the great duality in meaning, where at first it seems like this wonderful little witty examination of a computer programmer, but it’s got this really sensitive soft side that emerges at the end, and a lot of your songs seem to have that. Do you intentionally look to create a dual meaning into your songs?
J– Yea, I do like that multi-layered kind of song. Specifically, I’m a fan of songs that sound like they’re really up-beat and catchy, but are actually very sad. I don’t know why. There’s something I love about that moment of surprise you get when you listen the third or fourth or fifth time and you realize what the song is about and “Oh my god, that’s really interesting” or “That’s really sad.” So yea, I like that kind of listening experience. So it’s something for me to try to create that.
R. – Now another topic that you use in your songs, that we of course are very found of are zombies. Can you tell us a little about “RE: YOUR BRAINS”.
J – Yea, it takes the form of a memo, I suppose. It’s from one co-worker to another, except the writer of the memo is a zombie. And the receiver of the memo is a human, held up in some sort of safe place, probably a mall. I thought it was funny to have a zombie speak in this sort of corporate office lingo that everybody seems to fall into. You know, having worked in an office for almost 10 years, I was always amused by the things that would come out of my mouth, the phrases, these stock phrases that everybody uses, the language of business, and it’s often kind of meaningless, and that’s why people use it. It’s a safe kind of language. So I thought it would be amusing to have a character who was a zombie, who had this very base need , this requirement, for the love of eating human brains, but also was sort of very eloquent and moreover would speak in this ridiculously distant and empty office-speak. So that was the starting point for that song.
R- Can you tell us a little bit about what it’s like writing the soundtrack song for a video game? How did you start developing your ideas for the PORTAL song which has become so popular?
J – Well, they approached me and asked if I wanted to write the music for them, and I said, “yes, please,” because I was a huge fan of their game. I went to their offices and got to play the early version of the game, and sat with the developers and the writers and you know, we quickly realized that we had this shared sensibility in terms of character. You know the character of Glados in this video game. She’s a murderess with artificial intelligence. And she murders not because she’s mean, but because she sort of thinks that’s what she needs to do. It’s part of her job. And in a way that’s what makes her so tragic a character is that she’s doing terrible things but she doesn’t really know that they’re terrible. And she’s also very passive-aggressive. Plus the other thing that makes you really feel for her is that she’s trying to manipulate you, but she’s not very good at it because she’s a computer. So you have this character of the monster who can’t help but be a monster because they are a monster and that’s sad. I spoke with the writers a great deal about what the character was like, and what she would be feeling at the end of the game, and what she might want to talk about, and what the back story was, and then I just sort of went away and wrote it. I wrote one version, and they had a couple of suggestions for lyric tweaks. But really no big changes.
Then it went into the game, just like that.
R –There’s one thing I absolutely love about your approach to your work, and that is you encourage a lot of other people to use your material. How do you approach this, the allowing of others to appropriate your stuff?
J – Two things really. On the one hand, you can look at it kind of cynically and say, “Its free advertising for me.” And this is true. There are all these little tiny sub-networks of people on the Internet who have common interests. And talk to each other all the time, and share things with each other all the time. For me, to let my music be reused means the people in these little tiny sub-networks are going to take it and make something new of it and share it with all their friends. But in a larger sense, there’s something to the idea that art is really about theft, and more and more at least in the digital realm. The way we create things is to take other things and cut them into pieces and re-use them, whether you’re talking about mash-up or funny photo shop things or LOL Cats... it’s all about these ideas, this soup of ideas, bubbling and colliding and combining and splitting off. It’s just a really beautiful thing, and to me it is at the very root of what it is to be a creative person. So to participate in that, and allow my music to be a part of that, just seems to be the most natural thing in the world to me.
R – So what are some of your fave horror movies?
J – THE EXORCIST is still one of the scariest movies I have ever seen.
R- You’d be surprised just how many people tell us that.
J. – Yea, maybe because I saw it when I was far too young to be seeing it, but it scared the crap out of me. It was pretty scary, and at the time I had younger siblings who were babies, so they would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and I was sure they were possessed. It was the only explanation that made any sense to me. And then, I’m not sure, but I think it’s classified as a horror movie- ALIEN is such a terrific potboiler of a movie. It starts, and it just keeps going, and it ratchets up tension in a really great way. And it’s another huge favorite of mine. If it’s on television, I must watch it.
R. And for plugs- Where can fans find you? Where are your next concert appearances? What should we be checking out?
J- My website is : jonathancolton.com
You can listen to everything for free there, but I also hope that you buy it.
The DV and audio CD is called BEST. CONCERT. EVER.
That is the thing that is out now.
Song – “Skull Crusher Mountain” – and “Still Alive” are both in ROCK BAND.
Coming soon – song – read your brains
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