Hi, I'm Greg from Omaha.

I'm Michael from Baltimore.

Hey, I'm Dave from Portland, Oregon.

The Sound of Young America is produced independently and supported by listeners like you and me.

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It's the Sound of Young America.

I'm Jesse Thorne.

One of our favorite guests on the Sound of Young America is the singer-songwriter Jonathan Colton.

The first time he joined us five years or so ago, he'd recently had his first child

and it celebrated the occasion by quitting his well-paid and very steady management job

in the IT industry to pursue music full-time.

For a year, he recorded a new song every week, recording them and releasing them for free

on the web, and he built a following that made him since then become one of the most

successful, completely independent musicians in the world.

He sells his songs, which can also be downloaded freely on his website.

He hosts his own fan crews and he headlines shows in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans

of a song he wrote for a video game and other shows.

His fans even make their own videos for his songs, which mix the personal and the comic book absurd

and find pathos and laughs in very far-flung and unusual subject matters.

His new album, Artificial Heart, is in some ways his first.

It's his first venture into traditional record recording, in a real recording studio,

...