rediscovering Jonathan Coulton this morning

Ever since importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app back in March, I’ve been able to revisit things I tweeted over the years as part of my almost-daily scroll through Day One’s “on this day” feature. (In fact, it’s an almost-daily scroll because I’m having to purge the tweets that actually don’t work well as journal entries). That’s how I learned this morning that twelve years ago today, I reached out to Jonathan Coulton on Twitter to ask if the line “je suis celui qui suis” in his “barely remembered French” track Je suis Rick Springfield was an intentional reference to a similar line in the Bible or just a “crazy coincidence.”

I don’t remember if Coulton responded to my tweet, and my Twitter archive doesn’t seem to include replies (which is part of the reason why I’m purging so many of them from Day One after all), but reading the post this morning got me thinking about Coulton. He’s one of those artists that I really like when I remember he exists, but I don’t always remember that he does. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Les Cowboys Fringants, a new-to-me They Might Be Giants album (which is actually a decade old, because I also forget about how much I like TMBG), and the Train Valley 2 soundtrack. In fact, nearly four years ago, I wrote a shorter, similar post about rediscovering his music, but that obviously didn’t stick.

This is all somewhat surprising given the amount of my mental real estate Coulton has occupied over the past 15+ years. In a Facebook post from 2010 (which also appears in Day One thanks to an earlier import), I bragged about weirding out my roommates by listening to him. Around that same time, I bought a stuffed monkey toy and a hobby horse so that I could create a mashup stuffed animal for my then-fiancée as a reference to Coulton’s Skullcrusher Mountain. Back when I was teaching French 102, I would actually use a line from Je suis Rick Springfield (« je suis un chic type / qui joue de la guitare ») as an example of the e caduc in French (for all the clumsiness of his French, Coulton correctly pronounces « joue de la » in a way that resembles “Jude Law”; I didn’t really know who Jude Law was, because I was a guy who listened to Jonathan Coulton a lot, but I figured a pop culture reference would help my students). I also spent a lot of time fretting about the proper way to listen to Code Monkey without hearing the word “goddamn,” because that’s something that was really important to me at that time.

All of this led to me singing Je suis Rick Springfield in the kitchen while getting kiddo out the door for school this morning. Kiddo and I share a lot of interests, but she’s at an age where she’s (healthily) setting boundaries by insisting that she doesn’t have to like everything that daddy likes, and she decided that this weird French language song daddy was playing for her on his phone was one of those things she was going to reject. Fair enough, but I knew something that she didn’t, and I told her that we were going to listen to just one more song by Coulton as we got out the door and that she was going to like it.

In a true “crazy coincidence,” Day One tells me that today is also the one-year anniversary of my downloading Portal to kiddo’s Switch to see if she would like it. She did—a lot—and so I blew her mind by explaining that Coulton also wrote the excellent credits song Still Alive. We spent the whole trip to school talking about Portal and wondering if we’d ever completed the co-op campaign, and I felt vindicated… and happy to be remembering all of the time I’ve spent listening to Coulton.

It’s hard to say how long this re-memory is going to stick with me, but at least for this morning, I’m going to revisit some of my favorite Coulton songs and take some pleasure in it.

• Jonathan Coulton
• music
• Les Cowboys fringants
• They Might Be Giants
• Train Valley 2
• Portal
• parenting
• Twitter
• Day One
• French