And Then We Saw Jonathan Coulton In Concert Part 2
NOTE: I'm going to do something a little different with this post. Each song I talk about will be linked to a YouTube video of a performance (not the one I saw) and have a purchase link attached. Please, if you want to and can, buy tracks you like.
I'm a little hesitant to describe John Roderick as a supporting act, because he's an integral part of the show. The former lead singer of The Long Winters, Roderick, visually, looks like a slightly scaled up version of Coulton. Both have mid-length brown hair, both have beards and glasses and both are fiercely intelligent, articulate and funny.
Roderick's music is far more raw than a lot of Coulton's however, his vocal style much more aggressive and expansive and the first couple of songs he performed did a great job of demonstrating this as well as winning over the audience. I've been an opening act myself and I know hard it is to hold a room's attention, especially when they're waiting for people who aren't you. Roderick more than held his own, and, with his final number, hit me and a number of other people right in the heart.
The Commander Thinks Aloud (Buy)
The Commander Thinks Aloud is a song about the Columbia disaster. It's also a song written as The Long Winters, Roderick's band, was breaking up in the middle of recording an album. It's also one of the most powerful, almost impossibly moving songs I've ever heard. Roderick's vocal is passionate, unapologetic and completely unstoppable, mixing the grandeur of space travel with the desperately human, the beauty of achievement with the last frantic attempts to hang on to it as everything else is torn away. I remember getting half a day off school to watch the first shuttle launch, I remember the Challenger disaster and I remember the stricken look on a friend's face as he told me what had happened to Columbia. By the end of the song I was sobbing, even writing about this now I can feel myself tearing up. Raw, beautiful, chilling and utterly heartbreaking.
In the hands of lesser artists, this would have left a gaping chasm between where the audience were and where Coulton needed them to be. But as I said, this was a universal crowd, every age group interested in everything and passionately invested in the experience of being there. They were ready for something, anything more to happen. It did.
Sticking It To Myself (Buy)
First track and straight out of the gate, Coulton established the tone for the rest of the evening. Taken from his newest album, Artificial Heart, this is a bright, sparky look at exactly how little control we have over our more destructive instincts and how adept we all are at kicking our own asses. This is Coulton's work in a nutshell; witty, articulate, massively friendly and open-armed and with a rich vein of darkness and introspection that runs the gamut from funny to desperately sad.
Those themes are very much continued by the next track, the title track from Artificial Heart. It's almost the flip side of Sticking It To Myself; belligerent where that's self-aware, it's bravado tinged with self-deception rather than self-awareness.
Coulton brought the trilogy of songs that opened the set to a close with this, which again, showcases some of his best qualities. He's a fiercely good social observer and commentator, a Pinter or Ayckbourn with a guitar and a better sense of humour, and this song is one of his best. I've been at social gatherings like this one, I've been the guy who doesn't quite fit in with anyone and it feels and sounds just like this, a perfect storm of defiance, despair and free canapes.
John Scalzi is one of my favorite authors and his newest book, Redshirts, is a fascinating and very funny take down of how rubbish it was being a red-shirted ensign on Star Trek, mixing philosophy and black comedy with a deep love of this sort of science fiction. Scalzi asked Coulton to write a theme song for it, this is it and it's one of his best pieces, a slightly strutting, crumple-shirted rock hymn to the brave men and women of science fiction who give their lives so the command crew don't have to. Ensign Perez's of the world, Jonathan Coulton and I salute you.
Still Alive (Vocals on this version by Ellen Mclain) (Buy)
Coulton's most well known track, this is the theme song to Portal, one of the most innovative, not to mention funny, computer games of the last twenty years. It's a beautifully constructed character piece, from the point of view of GladOS, the murderous AI that you spend much of Portal being tormented by. Wry, funny and more than a little chilling, Still Alive is one of Coulton's character pieces, almost making you feel sorry for GladOS. You monster.
I first heard this song during a difficult time in my life. I've struggled on more than one occasion to feel at home in the work I've done and I'd just accepted a job doing something completely outside my experience. It was my first week, my first commute and I'd loaded my iPod with music that I hadn't had a chance to get to yet. This track cycled around and that was the first time I was moved to tears by a piece of music in a public place.
The job was a disaster, I lost it in short order and that was just the start of one of the most tumultuous periods of change I have ever experienced. One of the things that got me through it, one of the things that lets me look at the work I've done in my life up until now and feel that it has some worth, is this song, and the life of the man it's about, George Plimpton.
Love the things you try,
Drink a cocktail, wear a tie
Show a little grace if you should fall
I owe Jonathan Coulton a debt of thanks I can never fully repay for introducing me not only to the idea that searching for what you love is not just valid, it's compulsory but to a man who I view as a patron saint. Here's to you, Jonathan. And here's to you too, George.
You Ruined Everything (Buy)
Coulton is an incredible observer of human nature but when his focus turns inwards, he's extraordinary. This is a song that sits in the area he occupies so effortlessly; on the border between laughing and crying, in this case with exhaustion as the baby needs to be fed or changed again.
One of my favorites, because in the space of three minutes he skewers the problems of fame, the fact that Hollywood is still colossally homophobic, the short lifespan of the leading man and the fact that Tom Cruise is crazy. Coulton at his pithy, funny, vicious best.
A song based around a reference that goes back through a schoolyard rhyme to Another Book of Words At Play by Willard R. Espy, this has become one of his best known tracks. It's easy to see why, as it's in many ways the perfect Coulton track; arch, wry, self deprecating and deeply in love with language. It's also, weirdly, one of the very few tracks of his I'm not overly fond of. I don't dislike it, but there are lots of his tracks I like more.
Good Morning, Tucson (Buy)
Coulton's an effortlessly funny, avuncular frontman and he explained that this track was written after he'd spent some time on several Doom O'Clock regional breakfast shows. Coming from England, where BBC Breakfast News is the equivalent of a cup of tea and a coloring book handed to you by adults who are only telling you the fluffy news, I can understand the inspiration behind it.
Skullcrusher Mountain (Buy)
Coulton ushered his henchman, Drew Westphal, to the stage. Drew is Coulton's assistant, answering mail, running merchandise tables and, in this case, guesting on lead vocals on the most touching story of a super-villain serenading his extremely reluctant would-be girlfriend. Drew has a startlingly beautiful voice (even though Coulton insists he's hideously disfigured, a joke that ties in with the song. OR IS IT?) and this is another of Coulton's flagship numbers, a love song with a gigantic cybernetic fist, poised to crush all who oppose it.
When Portal 2 was released, Coulton returned to provide the end song once again. At the time, many people felt it wasn't quite as good as Still Alive, but I actually prefer Want You Gone. It's a beautiful exploration of how GladOS has changed and whilst the venom of the first one is still there, in lines like:
She was a lot like you,
Only not quite as heavy
There's something a little poignant to it, a sense of GladOS reaching her boundaries and not quite accepting they're there, let alone that she can step across them. She's still a ghastly, feral, murderous Artificial Intelligence but this song makes you want to pet her and tell her everything will be alright. Just from a distance.
'The beautiful scarred ones went all over the land, setting buildings on fire and breaking clocks.'
Henry Rollins
Nothing burns like youth, anger and opportunity. I grew up on a tiny island and I lost a good friend far too young. I held it together through force of will, good friends, a strong family and sheer bloodymindedness and even then I barely made it. The desire to do something, to start something, good or bad screams at you when you're an adolescent and this song is a perfect distillation of that.
One of Coulton's bounciest songs is also one of his darkest. A look at how a relationship collapses under the twin weights of expectation and apathy, this is the happiest song about total domestic misery written in the last few years. This is one of those songs that laughs so it doesn't cry and it sweeps you right along with it.
Je Suis Rick Springfield (Buy)
A song borne from a challenge from his producer, this is a shaggy dog story in the most beautiful language on Earth. A man tries to convince two girls he's Rick Springfield in slightly broken French. Like First of May, not one of my favorites but still articulate, smart, a little funny and poignant.
A hard rocking hymn to the Mandelbrot Set, this is possibly the only three minute maths lecture on Earth that you can dance to. It's also yet another side of Coulton's work, a completely sincere song about a piece of maths he loves. Science with guitars, this is one of his best.
One of Coulton's anthems, and again, this is horror and humor jammed together in a barricaded shopping mall with the ammo running low and the zombies patiently waiting. Coulton excels at combining the mundane with the fantastic and that's what you see here, the apocalypse viewed through the passive aggressive lens that's unique to middle management. Funny because it's true and horrifying because it could be true.
A song about behavior modifying drugs that runs headlong down the line between maniacal, funny and desperate. The narrator of the song is completely invested, completely consumed by his emotions and at the same time completely cut off from them. The genius of the song is in how it asks us to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
A song about how all a giant squid really needs is to be held. This is another of the songs that combines the horrific or the fantastic with the mundane and it's one of the sweetest numbers he's written without ever once seeming arch.
John Roderick returned to the stage for the encore, taking the lead vocals on a song about super-villain rivalry or at least, superficially about super-villain rivalry. It's actually a sharp, at times painfully funny, look at male rivalry and the desperate need men all have at times to define themselves by the people they compete against. Coulton as social commentator once again and as before, it's one of the areas he excels at.
The second to last song of the night, but arguably the star, Coulton performed this on a Zendrum. This was a delirious combination of one of his funniest songs and a cascade of samples that, at one point, turned the entire thing into Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) by Beyonce mashed up with the Super Mario Brother theme. It was an astounding, gleeful way to start to close the show down
The one cover of the night, again with John Roderick on vocals. This was a huge, boisterous piece of Americana to end the show, all swagger and cowboy boots and made all the funnier and more heartfelt by being performed by this group of musicians. A big, big-hearted end to the show that brought the stacked playlist into land in style.
Roderick and Coulton, along with bassist Adam Bernstein and drummer Christian Cassan are remarkable musicians, effortlessly running through a set which would have put lesser bands on their backs and proving that a colossal work ethic is as much a part of nerd music as intellect and self deprecation. Coulton, together with MC Frontalot and Paul and Storm, is leading a wave of musicians that are geeks as well as performers. They perform music about astronauts, death, video games, conventions, emotional security, emotional insecurity, good relationships, bad relationships, zombies, lonely squid and homicidal Artificial Intelligences, all delivered with intelligence, verve and a tremendous amount of rocking. It's a fascinating, heady mix of music that we'll be diving headlong into in a few weeks at W00tStock in San Diego. I can't wait.