Jonathan Mann is an Internet minstrel, writing a new song every day to serenade his growing online audience.His inspiration grounded in the music of Bob Dylan, the 26-year-old Mann cranks out often irresistible ditties on topics ranging from bank bailouts to penguin parties and an Oreo cookie's love for a glass of milk."It is about sitting down and opening the floodgates and letting it come out," Mann said from a chair at a desk in a corner of a small bedroom that doubles as his recording studio."I'm a three-chord kind of guy, very short and simple. The lyrics are the prime thing."Mann began writing a song a day on January 1 as part of an annual Fun-A-Day project organized by a group of US artists.The project calls on people to express themselves each day of the month with a new creation, whether it be a poem, a dance, a song, a drawing or some other form of artistic expression.At the end of January, Mann was having too much fun to quit."I'm happiest when I'm creating and if I can make that part of my daily thing, why stop?" Mann asked rhetorically.Mann's songs give voice to his perspective on anything from politics and economics to life, love and the hit science fiction television show "Battlestar Galactica"."There are laws of probability," said Mann. "If I write 31 songs in a month, I have a pretty good chance one of those is going to be excellent and the more I do it hopefully the better they get."He also bases songs on requests he gets at his rockcookiebottom.com website. Mann's enthusiasm for baking cookies prompted his girlfriend to once warn him he might hit a "rock cookie bottom".The phrase so struck Mann that he made it his Web home.Mann launched his online career with a GameJew persona in 2005. His character was based on the Mario hero of pioneering Nintendo videogame "Donkey Kong". Mann's outfit consisted of Mario's red hat and overalls.GameJew sang about and reported on the world of videogames, for which Mann had a passion. He even serenaded Shigeru Miyamoto with a tune he wrote just for the legendary Nintendo videogame designer."At the heart of everything, my biggest strength was song writing," Mann said. "I had a small but loyal audience."Music and videogames have always been entwined in Mann's mind."At 12 years old I put down a videogame control and I literally picked up the guitar," said Mann, who dates his song writing career from that moment."I started out aping Bob Dylan, but as I've grown I've taken on my own style."Mann said he fell out of "obsessive love" with videogames and was in search of a new artistic endeavor when he learned of the Fun-A-Day project."I try to always write things from my perspective," Mann said. "I've always been sort of left-leaning politically. I want to get away from the anger in those sorts of messages and get some of the naivety."A "Zombie Banks" song Mann wrote equates using public dollars to keep failing financial institutions on life support to nurturing the living dead found in horror films or videogames."If you let that zombie live they end up biting you and you become a zombie too," Mann said."You shoot that zombie in the head. You burn the corpse and you start again and that is what we should do with the banks. That is what the song says."Mann, who shares a cluttered Berkeley apartment with his girlfriend and a roommate, said he is eking out a living doing freelance online or commercial video jobs but work dried up as the economy melted down.Mann figures that at his current pace, he will have written about 22,000 songs by the time he is 85 years old."I don't see myself stopping any time soon," Mann said. "Barring some kind of unforeseen brain damage thing, where some weird part of my brain gets turned off and I lose the ability to be creative."Mann said he has grappled with the question of ensuring a song gets written on the day of his death."Do you wake up at midnight to make sure you write a song that day?" Mann asked before deciding that silence might be a fitting final chord to a song-a-day life.
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