JoCo learned about Creative Commons at Pop!Tech 2003, where he was first invited to perform The Future Soon. All this and more on everybody's favorite wiki.
ETA: I've sung IKEA in IKEA. I sing it just loud enough just in case someone walks by me and recognizes it. No one yet =/
I'm always wary to start a new thread, but does anyone know how to get vocal or background tracks for the JoCo songs? Besides CodeMonkey, which he released.
The headphones I use sorta mute the lead track when you tilt them a certain way, and so I have to ability to only hear backing tracks. It's really nice when you can hear the 4 part harmony in My Monkey, or the "HA HA HA MONKAY MONKAY!" of De-Evolving (my personal favorite? "Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaance, Johnson DAAAAAAannnnce, understand!")
I hope this makes sense and isn't the ramblings of a loon.
edit: Nevermind, I just remembered JoCo sells Karaoke tracks for a reason. Stupid me.
I wonder how hard it would be to separate the lead vocal tracks by subtracting the karaoke track from the regular version. I imagine it would work better with FLAC version of the regular track, but the karaoke track is compressed, and there might be some artifacts left over. This sort of processing is the real benefit of lossless compression, in my opinion.
I wonder if JoCo would be willing to play with an all volunteer, local to the venue band if practice time with them could be arranged before a show.
I don't want to sound like a cynical bastard, but if I were in JoCo's shoes, I would be extremely wary of the idea (even if, within my own shoes, I'd give my eye teeth to be a participant ;-) As a headline act, one already deals with a ridiculous number of variables in trying to put on a good show, even when many of those variables are nominally within one's contractual control - if the sound guy sucks, for instance, one can cry, shrug and say it couldn't have been foreseen. If a backing band were contemplated as anything other than song or two in the manner of an "audience participation" segment, the act should be able to have firm control of what happens on stage. Whether this means auditioning and rehearsing the band members yourself or delegating this duty to a third party, this is an investment of time and/or money.
To recontextualise it, assume that you have a specialised day job you take pride in, and somebody suggests that a few volunteers are going to "come in and help you at the office/workshop/Hadron collider" (or for that matter, look after your children). Now add to that being the owner of the business, and your given name is the brand... It would add up to you suddenly getting very businesslike about things.
Maybe this post is just a symptom of me having some pent-up feelings on behalf of performers all over who get asked "So this is your summer job/hobby?" ;-)
Random footnote regarding eye teeth and shoes: When I was a kid, the tooth fairy did, or rather conducted, her business in a shoe instead of under the pillow. This might be a cultural peculiarity.
I wonder what you'd get if you subtracted a track from a compressed version of itself. I wonder whether you'd be able to tell by listening to the results what format it was compressed into.
@CoolJammer00: no, I was a creepy doll last Halloween though! I thought it had some cultural relevance as the whole China-lead-paint thing was going down and dolls were even more deadly creepy then!
I was wondering if anyone knows and can tell me- in short, simpe words- how to download songs from YouTube to my iPod. Or if it was even possible for that matter. I would like to have the Birchmere concert to relive if possible. Thanks!
(This thread is drifting a little off-topic -- the stated topic being "questions you'd like to ask JoCo." Again, that's fine with me if it's fine with y'all, but there is a "General Questions" thread, as well as numerous open threads.)
JoAnn's question was answered in non-layman's terms in this thread. I'll try and make it clearer.
As Mark points out in the linked thread, it's not quite kosher with regard to the YouTube terms of service, but were you to go about it hypothetically, the easiest method might be (I use subjunctive mood to show how hypothetical I'd be): Find the URL of the YouTube page, then put it into http://vixy.net/ (credit to CoolJammer for spotting that) or http://flvto.com/ (which I saw on Lifehacker). For Vixy, there's a "Converts to" menu in the middle of the screen, which you'd have to set to "MP3 (audio only)".
For example, if you were to want to pull the audio from Encubed's My Monkey video from Pittsburgh, you might go to Vixy or FLV To and paste the URL ( ) into the box, set Vixy's "Converts to" option to MP3, then hit Start or OK.
When do we finally get to hear that dark and weird song about a nice day that you talked about during your UCLA interview? You tweeted about it back in April. We haven't had anything dark and weird since Octopus, which was over a year ago. (Can you believe it?) Kid-friendly songs are fine, but some of us more twisted fans are getting antsy. In the interim, I will just have to content myself with listening to Make You Cry on endless repeat. Kthxbye.
For JoAnn: I'll give you one more option, as I have quite a bit of experience adding JoCo youtube tunes to my iPod (er, I mean, "hypothetically"). For some reason I had a lot of trouble with vixy (haven't tried flvto.com), but I recommend this one:
It's easy to use, lets you download to video or audio (mp3 or wav, your choice). When it gives you options, you can just leave everything on default.
In order to bring this discussion somewhat back on topic, it makes me want to ask if JoCo has any favorite videos of his perfomances. Also, when he does watch, does he do it just for fun, or to critique himself and make changes/improvements?
Colleen has a point, JoCo has already clearly decided that mass producing songs is far more effective at producing numerous hits than working on a song for a long time. why is it then that we don't have a new song? I mean how long is this song going to be, if it is massively long I think I would eat my words and be very happy to get a large quantity of music in one go in terms of length.
Counterpoint: He's also said, though, that mass producing songs for TAW was incredibly draining, and he's already touring most weekends, which in itself is tough. (Not to mention that being away so much leaves less time to do the necessary week-by-week work -- aside from household stuff, taking care of the kid, etc., he's also effectively self-managed and he has to handle all the business part of his career with very little help.)
Besides, in my brief dabbles at imitating a creative person, I've found that deadline or no, when you're not satisfied with the way something's going, it's really, really difficult to say, well, I'll write this and post it even though I don't think it's any good. (JoCo is an entrepreneur, after all, and as Borba says a couple posts above, this is his brand -- it's no good, brand-wise, to disseminate work that one feels is subpar.)
JoCo made TAW look really easy, or at least a lot easier than it must've been...
@Bry: I'm just venting, because he's been teasing us with this song for a couple of months. I realize that he's got other things to do, which is why I'm directing my rhetorical question to the ether instead of pestering him with personal email. :-)
Maybe he needs that pressure, to do his best work. Many times during TAW he says he would go into Friday with very little done, and no real idea of where he was going. Hours later he had a great song.
You know what this means, right? Time for another Thing a Week! Yay!
Okay, maybe we need to give him a break during weeks when he travels. And he does have a toddler (though a baby didn't slow him down during TAW). Sooo, how about Thing Every Two Weeks? Thing a Month?
I recall the question that Storm asked jokingly in one video, "Where do you get your ideas?" It seems to me that many of his best ideas have been in some degree suggested to him, with someone asking him to write a song relating to a particular subject. The blank sheet of paper is daunting, but when John Hodgman asks for a song for a Little Gray Book lecture or Valve asks for a song for Portal, the results are often much better than what is produced by a blank sheet of paper and a deadline, if only because the sheet of paper is no longer entirely blank.
TaW, collectively, was great, but there were more than a few experimental pieces that never became popular, covers that never gained a huge following, and reworked songs that he'd originally written earlier, whether for Supergroup or for Little Gray Books. There were unquestionably some novel hits from TaW, but it was a fairly small fraction, and "this wrote itself in a couple of hours under deadline pressure" seems more the exception than the rule; in contrast, WTMT (five songs) is about half a Greatest Hits album, though in fairness it can be seen as a reworking of songs from Other Experiments (mostly, if not entirely, Little Gray Book-inspired) that, in his mind, made the cut. If that same approach had been taking with TaW, I'd expect a double album (at most) of WTMT-grade material with the rest being relegated to Other Experiments Vol. 2. I rather looks like the best approach, at least from a quality standpoint, is to produce large numbers of songs and throw half of them away.
I further suspect that "incredibly draining" can be expanded to "I used up nearly all the good ideas I'd had percolating for several years, and the pipeline is now nearly empty."
I further suspect that "incredibly draining" can be expanded to "I used up nearly all the good ideas I'd had percolating for several years, and the pipeline is now nearly empty."
Maybe he should do a Thing A Week for a year every four years. That gives good ideas time to percolate. Of course, it could also make him deliberately save up ideas for the next TAW year instead of recording them immediately.
ETA: And it would mean we'd have to go without concerts for a year.
And it would mean we'd have to go without concerts for a year.
But it is a small price to pay for 52 new songs.
I was thinking ealrier this week, JoCo is special in that he tends to play all the songs he has ever written at his concerts, as there is a fan for every song (almost), but most artists only play their singles and songs from their current album. The problem is JoCo doesn't have singles, so he has no real way of choosing songs his fans want to hear. Or should I say, no way of narrowing down the songs his fans want to hear.
I was thinking ealrier this week, JoCo is special in that he tends to play all the songs he has ever written at his concerts, as there is a fan for every song (almost), but most artists only play their singles and songs from their current album.
I was thinking earlier this week, JoCo is different because he releases his songs as soon as they're done, so instead of hearing bonus new songs from upcoming albums at concerts, you hear bonus covers and versions of known songs using unusual instruments.
Mtgordon: I found the same thing true with the creative process in regards to art, unlimited scope is very daunting and hard to come up with ideas for. The more restrictive the brief, the more creative you can be, almost. Within reason of course.
My question, and this can be answered by anyone, but I've always wondered why in Shop Vac he'd go out to Appleby's (assuming thats a bar?) and get drunk on daquiris because his wife forgot to hide the keys? Surely in the stereotypical suburban household the husband would either have his own car or would be allowed to drive it out if he wanted?
Applebee's is a restaurant chain which is commonly found in suburbs (I drive past one on the way to work) and which is noted for its... margaritas, really, but they're pretty close to daiquiris. Knowing that much, I suspect it was chosen for the rhyme (hide the keys/Applebee's/daiquiris). I imagine his wife is hiding the keys so he doesn't go out and get drunk again.
I didn't say, I see, that I really thought mtgordon summed it up really well in the post that C/P refers to. (Is "C/P" okay, or should I pick one or the other at random?)
Applebee's (here's an interesting article about it) is a national chain of "fast-casual" restaurants (including a bar), another suburban stereotype. I don't know if there's a good answer to your question, but I pictured the husband coming home and finding nothing better to do after dinner than going back out to drink.
(The thread to bump for the "Shop Vac" question, and similar questions, would've of course been "ITT we explain to each other song lyrics", but I won't hold it against you.)
I always saw it as the fact that going to casual dining restaurant Appleby's and getting tipsy on daquiris is all the fun this suburban husband (not being biased, but it seems like it's sung by a man, and JoCo claims that he wrote it while using a shop vac, thinking about how a suburban picket-fence life would be hell) is allowed to have, now that he has a wife and kids and lives in the burbs.
This is really one of the most depressing songs JoCo has written, especially if you read into all that forum subtext about the two news articles at the end of the song being about the man going postal and killing everyone and himself, so now he is literally "up above the house and looking down" wanting to go "back there".
I always thought that the man envied the one who died inthe shoot out, because "I guess I gotta go back there I guess there never was any other answer" sounds more like a sentence he is serving than what he is wishing to do- he wants to follow the cars speeding away through the dark.
I tend to sing it at the top of my lungs when really really angry. Generally when no one is around to hear me.
Yeah he really doesn't talk about his home life much. I'd never even heard his wife's name before til I read that interview that mentioned him singing to her at their wedding.
I guess it makes sense to separate one's internet/creative life with one's home life, particularly prudent if one seeks to become successful and finds fame as a by-product.
C/P: Sorry I snapped at you -- it's just over the last two pages I've had to post three times that the thread wasn't being used for its proper purpose. (Part of that, of course, was that I was trying to leech question ideas from it.)
Re: wife and kids -- I think that comes up in part, uh, 4...
Bry, that's ok, trying to control the tide of an internet forum is a hard job, I know. You do an amazing job to keep this lot as under control as you do. I'm first to admit I don't always have time to read all the pages of the thread so I'm sorry I missed your comment. In fact, I missed your first comment, between mtgordon's and my reply to him, because when I hit post it just showed my new comment straight after his, it wasn't til later when I came back and saw your first hint. Sorry!
And in reply to your question re: my name, I have posted on another thread saying you can just call me Perceph or 'Ceph. I'm phasing the Ceridwyn out so my wiki name and my forum name are the same, as someone on the wiki (possibly you) suggest ages ago. The Ceridwyn part will disappear in time.
And thanks for the hint. I shan't not use my wiki powers for evil >.>
[My first hint was intentionally identical (with song title changed) to a hint I'd dropped on the previous page. And perhaps you might try a forum name of "Percephene (was Ceridwyn)" or "(aka Ceridwyn)" or somesuch?]
[ETA: Yeah, I think I was the one to suggest you change your forum name. Also, your wiki powers won't be much good for peeking ahead at future interview parts, I'm afraid...]
Free associating from "seriously," I am wishing that people would post questions that they wish had been asked [in the Fan interview] about JoCo's early years.
Bry and I had a lot more questions that we ended up pitching because we were much more interested in the later questions; still, we knew we couldn't deduce fan curiosity when we didn't know what it was.
If you could ask JoCo a question about his high school time or before, what would it be? [And hopefully awryone will know the answer!]
What type of geek was he with the ladies? The type that had many interested in him but he was shooting for a level-up girl? Or did he date in his zone? Same question for who he married? Is she a geek too or just someone who appreciates his geekiness but does not share it?
His wife is a producer of some kind. I know that I've seen her name and looked her up on IMDB, but I'll be damned if I can find it now. (Google search "jonathan coulton wife producer" came up with nothing useful for me.)
being that he appears to share writing credit for it with adam stein, is there any way he could do 'one more score' live? or put up a fully-produced version for sale?
What type of geek was he with the ladies? The type that had many interested in him but he was shooting for a level-up girl? Or did he date in his zone? Same question for who he married? Is she a geek too or just someone who appreciates his geekiness but does not share it?
Mentioned this in the past, but once the guitar came out, he was one of the most popular people in our school. Not what I would associate with being a "geek".
He dated a few beautiful, smart girls back then and stayed with one of them into college. Then at Yale, he met a smart, beautiful actress, who was inspiration for I Hate California when she left for LA and abandoned their relationship. He'd been friends with his now wife since meeting her through Hodg, and they just started dating after his Ex moved to LA. His wife is not what I would call geeky, at all. Unless, to be considered geeky, you only have to be really smart. Which is always how I considered Jonathan.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it is a six digit salary.
I want to know- who are all the people helping him sing on the Podsafe Christmas Song? Who is Adam Curry, does he really have a copter and what is with a golden palace?
I think the others were all noted podcasters who'd used JoCo's music in their podcasts. Podcasting is like nearly everything on the Internet: nobody knows you're a dog. They could have all have helicopters and golden palaces, for all we know.
I put links to each of the "chipmunks" in that song on the Wiki. Adam is Adam Curry, the "godfather of podcasting", and CC Chapman is another podcaster. Len and Nora are from Jawbone Radio.
Comments
ETA: I've sung IKEA in IKEA. I sing it just loud enough just in case someone walks by me and recognizes it. No one yet =/
The headphones I use sorta mute the lead track when you tilt them a certain way, and so I have to ability to only hear backing tracks. It's really nice when you can hear the 4 part harmony in My Monkey, or the "HA HA HA MONKAY MONKAY!" of De-Evolving (my personal favorite? "Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaance, Johnson DAAAAAAannnnce, understand!")
I hope this makes sense and isn't the ramblings of a loon.
edit: Nevermind, I just remembered JoCo sells Karaoke tracks for a reason. Stupid me.
To recontextualise it, assume that you have a specialised day job you take pride in, and somebody suggests that a few volunteers are going to "come in and help you at the office/workshop/Hadron collider" (or for that matter, look after your children). Now add to that being the owner of the business, and your given name is the brand... It would add up to you suddenly getting very businesslike about things.
Maybe this post is just a symptom of me having some pent-up feelings on behalf of performers all over who get asked "So this is your summer job/hobby?" ;-)
Random footnote regarding eye teeth and shoes: When I was a kid, the tooth fairy did, or rather conducted, her business in a shoe instead of under the pillow. This might be a cultural peculiarity.
JoAnn's question was answered in non-layman's terms in this thread. I'll try and make it clearer.
As Mark points out in the linked thread, it's not quite kosher with regard to the YouTube terms of service, but were you to go about it hypothetically, the easiest method might be (I use subjunctive mood to show how hypothetical I'd be): Find the URL of the YouTube page, then put it into http://vixy.net/ (credit to CoolJammer for spotting that) or http://flvto.com/ (which I saw on Lifehacker). For Vixy, there's a "Converts to" menu in the middle of the screen, which you'd have to set to "MP3 (audio only)".
For example, if you were to want to pull the audio from Encubed's My Monkey video from Pittsburgh, you might go to Vixy or FLV To and paste the URL (
When do we finally get to hear that dark and weird song about a nice day that you talked about during your UCLA interview? You tweeted about it back in April. We haven't had anything dark and weird since Octopus, which was over a year ago. (Can you believe it?) Kid-friendly songs are fine, but some of us more twisted fans are getting antsy. In the interim, I will just have to content myself with listening to Make You Cry on endless repeat. Kthxbye.
http://www.mediaconverter.org/
It's easy to use, lets you download to video or audio (mp3 or wav, your choice). When it gives you options, you can just leave everything on default.
In order to bring this discussion somewhat back on topic, it makes me want to ask if JoCo has any favorite videos of his perfomances. Also, when he does watch, does he do it just for fun, or to critique himself and make changes/improvements?
Besides, in my brief dabbles at imitating a creative person, I've found that deadline or no, when you're not satisfied with the way something's going, it's really, really difficult to say, well, I'll write this and post it even though I don't think it's any good. (JoCo is an entrepreneur, after all, and as Borba says a couple posts above, this is his brand -- it's no good, brand-wise, to disseminate work that one feels is subpar.)
JoCo made TAW look really easy, or at least a lot easier than it must've been...
You know what this means, right? Time for another Thing a Week! Yay!
Okay, maybe we need to give him a break during weeks when he travels. And he does have a toddler (though a baby didn't slow him down during TAW). Sooo, how about Thing Every Two Weeks? Thing a Month?
TaW, collectively, was great, but there were more than a few experimental pieces that never became popular, covers that never gained a huge following, and reworked songs that he'd originally written earlier, whether for Supergroup or for Little Gray Books. There were unquestionably some novel hits from TaW, but it was a fairly small fraction, and "this wrote itself in a couple of hours under deadline pressure" seems more the exception than the rule; in contrast, WTMT (five songs) is about half a Greatest Hits album, though in fairness it can be seen as a reworking of songs from Other Experiments (mostly, if not entirely, Little Gray Book-inspired) that, in his mind, made the cut. If that same approach had been taking with TaW, I'd expect a double album (at most) of WTMT-grade material with the rest being relegated to Other Experiments Vol. 2. I rather looks like the best approach, at least from a quality standpoint, is to produce large numbers of songs and throw half of them away.
I further suspect that "incredibly draining" can be expanded to "I used up nearly all the good ideas I'd had percolating for several years, and the pipeline is now nearly empty."
ETA: And it would mean we'd have to go without concerts for a year.
I was thinking ealrier this week, JoCo is special in that he tends to play all the songs he has ever written at his concerts, as there is a fan for every song (almost), but most artists only play their singles and songs from their current album. The problem is JoCo doesn't have singles, so he has no real way of choosing songs his fans want to hear. Or should I say, no way of narrowing down the songs his fans want to hear.
Mtgordon: I found the same thing true with the creative process in regards to art, unlimited scope is very daunting and hard to come up with ideas for.
The more restrictive the brief, the more creative you can be, almost. Within reason of course.
My question, and this can be answered by anyone, but I've always wondered why in Shop Vac he'd go out to Appleby's (assuming thats a bar?) and get drunk on daquiris because his wife forgot to hide the keys?
Surely in the stereotypical suburban household the husband would either have his own car or would be allowed to drive it out if he wanted?
Maybe I'm missing something.
Applebee's (here's an interesting article about it) is a national chain of "fast-casual" restaurants (including a bar), another suburban stereotype. I don't know if there's a good answer to your question, but I pictured the husband coming home and finding nothing better to do after dinner than going back out to drink.
(The thread to bump for the "Shop Vac" question, and similar questions, would've of course been "ITT we explain to each other song lyrics", but I won't hold it against you.)
We tend to do our drinking at home
This is really one of the most depressing songs JoCo has written, especially if you read into all that forum subtext about the two news articles at the end of the song being about the man going postal and killing everyone and himself, so now he is literally "up above the house and looking down" wanting to go "back there".
Let's take Shop Vac discussion, which I wholeheartedly encourage, to the aforelinked thread.
I guess there never was any other answer" sounds more like a sentence he is serving than what he is wishing to do- he wants to follow the cars speeding away through the dark.
I tend to sing it at the top of my lungs when really really angry. Generally when no one is around to hear me.
Please don't make me stand in the corner again!
How's the wife and baby?
Well I am LIKE that! (I did ask about the baby at Birchmere in fact...)
I guess it makes sense to separate one's internet/creative life with one's home life, particularly prudent if one seeks to become successful and finds fame as a by-product.
Re: wife and kids -- I think that comes up in part, uh, 4...
And in reply to your question re: my name, I have posted on another thread saying you can just call me Perceph or 'Ceph. I'm phasing the Ceridwyn out so my wiki name and my forum name are the same, as someone on the wiki (possibly you) suggest ages ago. The Ceridwyn part will disappear in time.
And thanks for the hint. I shan't not use my wiki powers for evil >.>
[ETA: Yeah, I think I was the one to suggest you change your forum name. Also, your wiki powers won't be much good for peeking ahead at future interview parts, I'm afraid...]
/end thread hijack.
As if I'd do that, seriously.
Bry and I had a lot more questions that we ended up pitching because we were much more interested in the later questions; still, we knew we couldn't deduce fan curiosity when we didn't know what it was.
If you could ask JoCo a question about his high school time or before, what would it be? [And hopefully awryone will know the answer!]
He dated a few beautiful, smart girls back then and stayed with one of them into college.
Then at Yale, he met a smart, beautiful actress, who was inspiration for I Hate California when she left for LA and abandoned their relationship.
He'd been friends with his now wife since meeting her through Hodg, and they just started dating after his Ex moved to LA.
His wife is not what I would call geeky, at all.
Unless, to be considered geeky, you only have to be really smart. Which is always how I considered Jonathan.
I want to know- who are all the people helping him sing on the Podsafe Christmas Song? Who is Adam Curry, does he really have a copter and what is with a golden palace?
I think the others were all noted podcasters who'd used JoCo's music in their podcasts. Podcasting is like nearly everything on the Internet: nobody knows you're a dog. They could have all have helicopters and golden palaces, for all we know.