Jonathan Coulton is one of those people that exemplifies the best of the Internet can be about. He’s a folky, slightly nerdy, and exceptionally talented musician who did the “Thing a Week” project a year or two, where he produced one song a week for one year and released all of them for free (under a Creative Commons license) on his website. Many of these tracks have subsequently battered geek culture like a series of class 5 hurricanes of humor, including an ode to lovelorn IT workers everywhere, the finest song about zombies ever written, and a cover of an 80’s classic.

So I downloaded the whole series of “Thing a Week” sometime shortly after the new year, and I like many of them a lot. But two songs in particular have stuck with me, not because they’re funny (they’re not), but in how they’ve really captured the tone of my life over the past three or four months: “So Far So Good“, and the ridiculously beautiful “When You Go“. It’s probably not a secret to the people likely to be reading this that a few months ago I was involved in a pretty bad breakup, which has been hurtful, painful, and messy. (I in particular said and did things of which I am not proud.) These two songs ring so true, one about what I’ve finally gotten over (“When You Go”) and one about where I am now (“So Far So Good”), that they’ve really gotten a lot of play time in my MP3 player. So thank you very much, Mr. Coulton; you’ve gotten me through a lot.