GrooveLily

I think about Jonathan Coulton a lot. At the age of 35 or so, he decided to finally quit his job and go for it, and try to be a rock star in one form or another. He had a wife and child who were supportive of this endeavor (truth be told, I don’t have the details of how it went down at the time, but I gather from his success that they’re not too unhappy about it).

He’s really smart, he’s really talented, and he’s a genuinely skilled practioner of his art–the kind of skill that takes a lot of time and effort – something akin to the 10,000 hours it takes to become masterful that Malcolm Gladwell has written about so convincingly.

Coulton also had the very good luck of being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing for the right audience: writing songs for nerds, and making a new one available for free, every week, for fifty-two weeks straight. He describes himself (only half-mockingly, I presume) as an internet superstar–and he is just that. His songs are touching, hilarious, and geeky, and they appeal to my heart, my sense of humor, and my unrepentant geeky self.

He also set himself a very hard row to hoe there–a newly written, completed and mixed song every week for an entire year. Admittedly he cheated a few times–cover versions, a mashup, and he admits he finished some old unfinished stuff in the interest of meeting his self-imposed deadline…but he did make new stuff every week.

I used to dream of finding ways for us to do this in GrooveLily–I imagined, in the days before mp3′s, of doing a Barbara-Kessler-style “cd single of the month club,” where we’d be forced to make and finish new stuff all the time. Deadlines are so freeing in their restrictions–they force you to make decisions and not dillydally about with different options.

Note the "add to iTunes library" box at the bottom

The funny thing is, since about 2006, when our touring really started to slow down, me & Val’s songwriting output has picked up, and up, and up. I always export mp3′s of whatever I’m working on in Logic, and I always check the box “import into iTunes?” so that when the mix is finished I can go into iTunes to listen to what I’ve done and compare and contrast. Some nights after the kid’s asleep and I have a spare moment, I’ll go into the iTunes library on this machine and sort by “date added” and work my way back from the present back to April 2006, when I started keeping track of songs this way… and after about an hour of dropping the needle I find that it’s really late at night and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of all the cool stuff we’ve made.

So much of what we have made since 2006 has not been the kind of thing we’ve been able to release on a weekly Coulton-like basis–we have written songs for Disney movies, pitched songs for other movies and commercials, and thrown ourselves wholeheartedly into making other people’s music sound good. In each of these cases, it wasn’t an option for us to share what we were doing on our website–much as we would want to–because we were doing works made for hire. We’ve written and thrown into the trunk maybe as many as 20 songs for “Toy Story The Musical,” and legally we can’t share any of them–you can only hear the finished ones on youtube or on the Cruise Ship Disney Wonder.

In addition, we’ve got tons of material for our unfinished-yet-still-extremely-dear-to-our-hearts GrooveLily musical, WHEELHOUSE, which has been on the back burner for years now due to the exigencies of doing other projects. (It’s still simmering back there, marinating, if you will…in our very best slow-cookin’ sauce, for your eventual enjoyment. We just haven’t yet carved out the time to garnish and serve.)

On the other hand, Jonathan Coulton specifically took the leap, quit his job and started making creative output once a week with the intent of making a living as an artist. It was a big leap, but he leapt.

We made that “making a living” leap a long time ago. We have been through the wringer of 150 shows a year, driving three band vehicles into the ground, and come out the other side; we may no longer be as active a rock band as we once were, and sometimes it feels a little silly driving Millie Van Lily (our large van) to meetings and workshops and the grocery store…but we are more active musicians than ever.

So while I would love the opportunity that Mr. Coulton gave himself back in 2005 – one song a week – the fact is that we’re cranking out at least that many already. We just can’t show them all to you yet.

Are we there yet? Yep. And so is he.