Jonathan Coulton

They Might Be Giants launched their career through Dial-a-Song, an answering-machine setup in Brooklyn that let callers hear randomly selected recordings. Frequent overloads never stopped the service from attracting enough attention to secure the band a deal with indie label Bar/None. Jonathan Coulton, who drew both musical and conceptual inspiration from the group, reached listeners in the 2000s by reviving the same direct-distribution idea as “Thing a Week,” a weekly podcast that delivered one freshly recorded track for fifty-two consecutive weeks. His gift for building pop arrangements around offbeat topics, often laced with bittersweet humor—as when a moon of Pluto offers mournful reassurance about its loss of planetary rank—quickly gathered a devoted cult following.

Coulton first met writer and comedian John Hodgman while both attended Yale, and the two soon began working together on multiple projects. After graduation they moved to Manhattan; Coulton supported himself as a software engineer while quietly issuing his own off-kilter folk-rock discs, among them the 2003 album Smoking Monkey and the 2004 EP Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow. Hodgman simultaneously began presenting the Little Gray Books lecture series and hired Coulton as musical director, creating songs that matched each evening’s theme.

In September 2005, Popular Science included Coulton’s science-themed EP Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms as a downloadable bonus and listed him on its masthead as Contributing Troubadour. That same month he left his programming job and announced he would earn a living solely from music, even without label support. He met the self-imposed deadline of his “Thing a Week” series by finishing and posting one song every seven days; over the next year the fifty-two tracks accumulated a growing audience that paid for MP3s and CDs despite free streaming options. Early standouts—an acoustic cover of “Baby Got Back,” the mad-scientist serenade “Skullcrusher Mountain,” and the office-zombie update “Re: Your Brains”—spread rapidly online.

All of the material appeared under a Creative Commons license that permitted both sharing and reuse. YouTube videos pairing the songs with game footage and animation clips spread through blogs until Coulton closed the series with exuberant Queen covers of “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You,” cementing his status as a geek-rock figure. Fan surveys then guided a series of short, profitable regional tours whose ticket, digital, and merchandise income soon exceeded his former salary.

“Code Monkey,” drawn from his software-engineering days, became the theme for G4’s Code Monkeys cartoon in 2007, while “Still Alive,” written for the game Portal, earned the Game Audio Network’s Song of the Year award. Coulton performed on The Daily Show and contributed tracks to MC Frontalot’s Final Boss and MC Lars’ This Gigantic Robot Kills. In 2010 he began opening for They Might Be Giants and later announced a collaboration with John Flansburgh that produced his eighth album, Artificial Heart—the first release produced by someone else. Issued independently, it reached number 125 on the Billboard Top 200.

A year later he joined NPR’s Ask Me Another as house musician, supplying both original songs and topical parodies for the trivia segments. While maintaining that role he released a 2012 Christmas collaboration with John Roderick of The Long Winters and the 2014 concert album JoCo Live. With comic-book writer Greg Pak he created the graphic novel Code Monkey Save World, based on characters from his songs. The 2017 concept album Solid State arrived accompanied by its own graphic novel. In 2019 he issued the crowd-funded covers collection Some Guys, featuring renditions of Seals & Crofts’ “Sister Golden Hair,” Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” and the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love.”