coulton.jpgThis is quite an inspirational piece for me as a songwriter.

So … there’s this guy, Jonathan Coulton, that decided to write a song a week for 1 year. He would post a new song every Friday that he recorded in his very modest home studio. He dubbed the project “Thing-A-Week”.

He started out not really knowing what would happen. Then, one of his songs got Slashdotted. He started getting covered by bloggers. Then some of his songs (licensed under a Creative Commons copyright agreement) were picked up for movies. He was then asked to write a theme song for MTV.

His project was picking up steam for sure. Magazines and larger news organizations started picking it up.

He makes some decent money off the project too … check it out:

Coming up on one year, Jonathan talks with Garage Spin about his experience.

It’s quite fascinating. Below, I have posted a couple of quotes from the article which resonated with me:

On how he came up with the idea.
“The idea came from a co-worker at my long lost day job as we were discussing my impending unemployment and what I was going to do with my time. It sounded totally insane and impossible, but I had a lot of pent up creative energy, so I figured I’d give it a shot. And the more people paid attention, the harder it was to stop.”

On what happened when he had no inspiration for a song.
“The most surprising tracks for me are the ones that were done under extreme pressure and still turned out pretty good. There were weeks where I had no ideas until the afternoon of the day I was supposed to post a new song. And there were plenty of sad songs that came out of the horrible desperate feeling that I would probably never be able to write a song again.”

His response when asked if he has been approached by labels:
“I haven’t ever been approached by a label, which sort of surprises me. I mean, I know that I’m a little too niche-y for the big guys, but I imagine there’s got to be some indie label who’d like to make a million dollars off me.”

The rest of the article is a must-read, and available here.

Jonathan’s Website. This site has all his songs from the project as well as a very informative F.A.Q. with his home studio details and more.

Direct link to his Thing-A-Week songwriting project songs.