Thing a Week

"Thing a Week" is the name that Jonathan Coulton gave to a creative experiment which ran from September 16, 2005 (See You All in Hell) to September 30, 2006 (We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions). When he quit his day job to pursue music full-time, one of his co-workers suggested that he release a song each week for a year. In this project, Coulton undertook to record 52 musical pieces in the course of a year, one each week. This target was mostly achieved, missing only a few weeks. The objectives were: (a) to push the artist's creative envelope by adopting what Coulton describes as a "forced-march approach to writing and recording"; (b) to prove to himself that he was capable of producing creative output to a deadline; and (c) to test the viability of the internet and Creative Commons as a platform capable of supporting a professional artist financially. The resulting 52 tracks included many original songs, some covers, one mash-up, and a few songs based largely or entirely on sampled or synthesized vocals. Some of the original songs had a previous history, having been performed or recorded earlier, but many were truly novel works. Fifty-one of the tracks (excepting the mash-up, for legal reasons) were collected in a series of four seasonally-themed CDs which are available singly or as a boxed set.

• List of Thing a Week songs
• Thing a Week One
• Thing a Week Two
• Thing a Week Three
• Thing a Week Four