Jonathan Coulton

JC: Oh sure, there were plenty of those weeks. It was sometimes hard and sometimes easy. A lot of it had to do with what else was going on in my life, and what had just happened in Thing a Week. If I had just written a song that was receiving a lot of attention, it would ruin me for a couple weeks because I was competing against myself. It went in cycles, so that would happen and then I would write a couple that maybe my heart just wasn't in it, or I was stymied in some way. A couple didn't turn out great, and then I would get through it and forget about it, and when I least expected it, songs that either I really loved or everyone else really loved would just emerge.

CP: What was it like to force your creativity like that?

JC: By the end of the year, I was in a strange place because I'd long since run out of ideas. On top of that, more and more people were paying attention, so the pressure was going up and the well was completely dry. But the last 13 songs, which are what I put on Thing a Week 4, were some of my favorites; it's my favorite CD out of the four. I think it was only at that point that I got to a place in my head where I could write and create in sort of a pure way, because I'd stripped everything else away. To this day those songs sound and feel to me like somebody else wrote them. Or at least I don't remember writing them.

CP: A lot of your songs, like Re: Your Brains, are tongue-in-cheek, but you also have more sincere songs, like Summer's Over. Do you feel any pressure to write quirky stuff because that's what seems most successful?

JC: I feel the pressure of the audience's expectation. And yeah, I've relied on the funny, quirky stuff to attract attention; that makes sense. There's a vast sea of earnest pop out there, and it's very hard to distinguish yourself from other people in that field. What it comes down to is, I don't always control what I choose to write about because I'm only really creatively motivated when I have a subject, or a character, or a musical idea that's interesting and challenging to me. As much as it might be wise to write a long string of songs about aliens and robots and zombies, once I do the zombie thing, it's like, "Eh, I don't know if I want to write another zombie song." Maybe I'm feeling a little sad this week and I want to explore that, or use that as the creative motivator. So I feel the pressure, but I try to ignore it.

Jonathan Coulton performs tonight at the Varsity Theater. 18+.
Thu., May 1, 7 p.m., 2008