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'Weird Al' Yankovic On The Best And Most Obsessive Music Of His Career

A Vulture series in which artists judge the best and worst of their own careers.

"I always try to make my songs a little weirder or more demented than the original artist." Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Nick Elgar/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

It's not odd to assert that "Weird Al" Yankovic is a rock star. Through tenacity, luck, and a gentle comedic touch, Yankovic was able to carve out one of the most remarkable niches the music industry has seen over the past four decades as a parodist whose work not only frequently overshadows the original songs they're based on, but serves as a conduit for exposing and converting listeners to the source material. Can you raise your hand if "Smells Like Nirvana" was what introduced you to a little three-piece band from Seattle, or perhaps if a little ditty about lunch made you curious about Cyndi Lauper? "I mean, for a guy who just does goofy stuff," he tells me, "I put a lot of hard work into making sure I didn't ignore or miss anything in pop culture." Yankovic can also shred the accordion with a virtuosity that rivals Geddy Lee on the bass or Tony Banks on the keyboards, a skill that, ever the humble man, he'll only toot his horn for a little. "I will say, a lot of accordion players who you see onstage will only play the right-hand part, which is the piano keyboard. So any piano player can play that," he says. "But a real accordion player like me can play the buttons on the left hand, because that takes research and commitment."

Yankovic is currently embarking on his 67-city Bigger & Weirder Tour — the largest of his career — traversing the country with enough instruments, intricate choreography, and wardrobe changes to make any pop star feel inadequate. It will keep him busy until the end of September, when he hopes he can begin to meaningfully divert time to his next project, which won't be new parodies for the foreseeable future. "The one thing I haven't done yet is a Broadway musical, and that's something that could happen," he says. "There are talks being held and meetings taking place. It's something that takes years to come to fruition. I'm not going to hold my breath on it." But if it does, there's a certain Tony-winning actor who would be a perfect fit.

"Eat It," which was on my second album. My first album did well enough to merit the record company rolling the dice on album No. 2. It had a couple of very minor hits, such as "Ricky," which was ostensibly the first comedy video ever played on MTV, and "I Love Rocky Road." They appealed to, I suppose, hard-core comedy nerds and didn't reach a much wider audience than that. But when you add Michael Jackson to the equation, all of a sudden it becomes a much bigger fan base. "Eat It" was an international hit and completely changed my life overnight. To give an example, in 1983, I was touring with Dr. Demento as his opening act. Dr. Demento, of course, gave me my start. He played my stuff on the radio and was famous for playing novelty music, but it was his show. He would come out with some turntables and do The Dr. Demento Show, and I was billed as "special guest 'Weird Al' Yankovic." After "Eat It," all of a sudden it was "'Weird Al' Yankovic featuring Dr. Demento."

"The Saga Begins," which was my parody of "American Pie." I really wanted to do that song, and everybody was telling me, "There's no way Don McLean is going to approve that. He gets approached all the time. He turns everybody down. That song was sacred. You don't want to mess with that. There's just no way." My mantra is "It never hurts to ask." At that point in my life, I had learned not to go through all the trouble of writing an entire song and then asking permission, because that's a lot of wasted effort if they say no. These days, it's extremely rare that they would say no, anyway, but still, I don't want that chance. So it was somewhat of an elevator pitch, like, "I want to do a parody of 'American Pie.' It's going to be about the new Star Wars movie a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. What do you think?"

Against all odds, he said yes. I know that he had a couple of young kids, so maybe they were Star Wars fans if he wasn't. I heard that Don's kids were such fans of my parody that they would sing my song around the house all the time, to the point where Don was having a tough time remembering his own lyrics while performing onstage. To this day, we're friends and he's a fan of the parody, which still kind of blows my mind.

"Jackson Park Express," which is one of my favorites. It was the last song on the Mandatory Fun album. It's about a bus ride, which I thought was a fitting bookend, because one of my very first songs was "Another One Rides the Bus." And here was the last song, on what's probably my last album, and it's like the dark side of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful." It's this whole conversation that a guy has in his head after seeing a woman on the bus. It goes into some really weird and dark areas. We progressively learn how creepy this guy is, and by the middle of the song, he talks about wearing "your skin on my skin, but not in a creepy way." And "making a wall mural out of your lint." Just random stuff like that. There might be songs that are equally weird, but probably none are weirder than that one.

I remember seeing a tweet somebody wrote that sparked the idea — the old Twitter. Retro Twitter, back when people were being funny. It wasn't the whole concept of "Jackson Park Express," but it was some idea that made me think, Oh, I could have this whole bizarre interior monologue and have it go on and on and on and be progressively stranger. A lot of ideas come that way. You see one small thing, which you wouldn't think you'd get an idea for a whole song out of, but it awakens something inside of you.

"Lasagna" wound up on an accordion-compilation album called Monsters of the Accordion. It's sort of like the Italian version of "La Bamba" and features the accordion extensively. That's the poster child for my accordion work that I'm incredibly proud of. The ones that are the most technically proficient are almost impossible to play live. There's a song called "Everything You Know Is Wrong," which is on the Bad Hair Day album. I recorded that thinking, Oh, I'm never going to play this live. I'm going to make this ridiculously impossible to play. There's a chromatic run in the solo, which I don't think any accordion player in the world could play. That was still in the analog days. We actually slowed the tape down and I played it much slower in a different key so that when you speed it up, it's an incredibly fast chromatic solo. I do play the song live now, but I had to rewrite it a little bit so that a human could be physically capable of playing it.

I'm not one of these studio cats. I mean, serious musicians practice eight hours a day and they go into a studio and can sight-read anything off a chart. That's not me. I do read music and can play music, but I mostly play by ear, and I'm pretty good at it. I can sit in on jam sessions and not embarrass myself too much. I'm not great at riffing on big solos off the top of my head, but I've got a good ear for chords. It's pretty loosey-goosey.

My favorite was Chamillionaire, who aided my parody of his song "Ridin' Dirty." He came up to me on the red carpet of the Grammys shortly after winning Best Rap Song. He warmly thanked me. He said that I was partly responsible for him winning the Grammy, because my parody made it undeniable that it was the rap song of the year.

"Genius in France," which is my Frank Zappa pastiche on Poodle Hat. I'm a big Zappa fan, so I thought if I'm going to do a tribute to the man himself, I've got to really give it everything I've got. I spent months writing that song because I wanted it to encapsulate every era of his career and have it be the definitive parody. I really went into the weeds. In fact, I got Dweezil Zappa to do the guitar solo at the beginning of the song to lend it a little credibility. I went through Frank's entire oeuvre, made notes, and figured out all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies and the little arrangement choices that he made and tried to write a song in his style. I always try to make my songs a little weirder or more demented than the original artist, but Frank was there already. So I like to think of it more as a lost Frank Zappa song.

There's little xylophone runs and bizarre sound effects that come out of nowhere, and the low Frank Zappa voice can be heard in some sections. He would go into weird tangents, which is why I go into this banjo-driven country-and-western vibe out of nowhere — just wild genre swings in the middle of something. I used a few of his catchphrases, like "great googly moogly." I had dozens of pages of notes written. It's everything that I thought screamed "Zappa" to me. I think that's the song I spent the most time on, actually, because it took a long time to arrange and record. One of the reasons we don't do it live is because it's so complicated and convoluted. I remember when we recorded it, my drummer, who usually does everything in one or two takes, said, "We're going to need to cut this up into 17 separate pieces and record them all individually and stream them together."

There are parodies I wanted to release that got turned down. Prince would be the best example of that. There are things that got recorded but didn't get officially released, such as my James Blunt parody, "You're Pitiful." There are a lot of songs that seem to be great candidates or fodder for parody, and I just can't think of a good enough idea. I have thousands of examples of that. Every time a song comes around that's a big hit, I think, What can I do with this? I can always generate a hundred bad ideas, but the one good and clever idea is sometimes elusive. A lot of those songs wind up in the polka medleys. If you weed through the medleys, those are a lot of great examples of songs I thought that I had ideas for but were never good enough.

I've shut my antenna off with that now. There was a period in my life of many years where I was obsessed with the "Billboard" charts, listening to pop radio, and thinking, What can I do with this? What can I do with that? I haven't done that for a while. I'm not focused on writing parodies. It's not that I've given up or I'll never do parodies again. There are other things that seem more fun to me right now, more attractive, and a better use of my time. There are certainly artists and songs that I come across where I think, Oh, this is a great hit and an ever greater parody candidate. But my head's not really in that place right now.

There are several that dated pretty poorly and I wouldn't play anymore. The one that probably aged the quickest was "Buckingham Blues" from my first album. When I originally wrote it, it was a parody of "Jack and Diane" by John Cougar Mellencamp, but he didn't want me to use his song because apparently he was in negotiations for a "Jack & Diane" movie, which we're still waiting on. Hey, it could happen. It's been a few years, John. So the option was for me to recalibrate it and make it an original song. The whole idea is about Lady Diana and Prince Charles getting married, because I wrote it in 1982, and everybody was so into that whole ceremony. It was all anybody could talk about, and it was very topical at the time. But in a few short years, not only was that not topical, it would have been in bad taste.

There are a few songs I won't do now for one reason or another. Either they're not popular or there's language in them that was maybe okay in the 1980s and 1990s and is now offensive. I have to weigh it, because some things are borderline. Some people think that maybe I wouldn't play "Fat" because that's offensive to some people. But in my head, it's a body-positivity song. It's not a song saying "you're fat" or saying that being fat is a negative thing. The whole point is the guy in the song is saying, "I'm fat and I'm proud of it." Even though it's basically a string of fat jokes, in my head it's not offensive. I wouldn't play "Jerry Springer" again, because there are a lot of terms in there that are offensive to people. In my defense, I used those words because those are the exact words that were used on The Jerry Springer Show at the time, and it made sense then. But I understand the power of words and how they're offensive to people, and for that reason, I wouldn't do that now.

Mandatory Fun. For every album I put out, I felt like each time I had to top the previous album. I was always challenging myself, spending more time researching ideas, and being more focused. That's another reason why I decided to quit when I hit No. 1 on the charts and my record deal was over. I thought, Well, this is a good mic drop, and I'm kind of tired of having to top myself. I had a Microsoft Word document that I updated weekly for decades, which was basically the "Billboard" Top 10 albums and the "Billboard" Top 10 singles. If an album made it to the top three, I'd underline it, and if it made it to No. 1, I'd double underline it. Then I'd have a note of how many weeks it was at No. 1. I would go down these lists and pay particular attention to all the underlined ones. I was very analytical about it.

"Smells Like Nirvana." It was my first comeback, as it were, because my movie UHF came out in 1989 and it bombed pretty spectacularly at the box office. I went through about three years where I was sort of in the wilderness and not knowing if I'd ever come back. I almost did another Michael Jackson parody because I was reaching that point of desperation. And then Nirvana came along. I didn't think when I first heard Nirvana that they would ever be big enough for me to do a parody of them, and then they hit No. 1. I thought, Oh my, this is perfect. I love this group, and I could have a lot of fun with this.

That changed everything around me at the time. Afterward, I was back on MTV and touring again. I picked up where I left off. That was the point where I realized that a good, long career has peaks and valleys, and you can't get too depressed when you're in a valley or too full of yourself when you're at the peak. You just have to ride it out, and it was nice to be able to prove that in practice with the Nirvana song. I was told by somebody from Nirvana's label that they sold an extra million copies of Nevermind after my parody came out. I've run into Dave Grohl many times over the years, and he said that was one of the signs they knew they made it: getting a Weird Al parody. He saw me perform in Seattle once and said it was the loudest show he had ever heard, which kind of surprised me. That stuck in my head, because I thought it was an odd comment.

"Amish Paradise," because Florence Henderson alone in that video elevated the medium. I was very proud of the backward sequence at the end. I'm certainly not the first person to think of recording something backward for a music video, but it was something that took a lot of work and effort to get the logistics figured out. I had to phonetically memorize the whole last verse backward, and then walk backward through a farm yard and land in a pile of hay. I'm amazed we were able to pull that off in a couple of takes. As a whole, I'm not consciously trying to connect all my videos in some way other than the fact that they all come out of my sick brain.

The Rock Hall is going to do what they're going to do. They're obviously expanding the boundaries of what constitutes rock and roll when they make their decisions. If they're going to ever pick a comedic entry, I'd like to think I'd be considered for that. If they pick another accordion-playing parody writer ahead of me, I'd be upset. I don't lose any sleep over having not been nominated. Right now, there are millions of people saying, "Why isn't he in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?" And I'd prefer that to having millions of people saying, "Who let that jerk in there?"

Modeling some snazzy shirts over the decades. Clockwise from left: Photo: Erik Hein/American Broadcasting Companies via Getty ImagesPhoto: Lee Celano/WireImagePhoto: Rosalind O'Connor/NBC via Getty Images

Modeling some snazzy shirts over the decades. From top: Photo: Erik Hein/American Broadcasting Companies via Getty ImagesPhoto: Rosalind O'Connor/NBC ... More Modeling some snazzy shirts over the decades. From top: Photo: Erik Hein/American Broadcasting Companies via Getty ImagesPhoto: Rosalind O'Connor/NBC via Getty ImagesPhoto: Lee Celano/WireImage

The Hawaiian shirt that I wore for the bulk of my movie UHF. It's an orange Hawaiian shirt. I haven't worn it since the movie. There's nothing that screams "custom" about it, so the stylist probably found it in a thrift store. In fact, I was getting ready to donate it to the Smithsonian. I had several things I was going to give to the museum because it requested it for a "Weird Al" exhibit, but I'm putting that on hold because, as you may have heard, the Smithsonian is going through some changes right now, and I'm waiting until the dust settles. So it may or may not ever make its way there, but it's certainly the most prized shirt of my life.

See All According to Yankovic in a previous interview, Prince turned down four parody ideas and had trouble understanding their humor. The songs were: "Let's Go Crazy," "1999," "When Doves Cry," and "Kiss." A sample stanza: "Five days since they had the show / With the hermaphrodite, the slut, and the crack ho." Last year, the Rock Hall's chairman admitted Yankovic has "never made it close" to the ballot. John Mulaney has since loudly advocated for his induction.

Songs To Make You Laugh, With 'Weird Al' Yankovic - NPR

Kyle Gass and Jack Black of Tenacious D performing live. Paul McConnell/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Paul McConnell/Getty Images

Since April is National Humor Month, it seemed only fitting to play a mix of some of the funniest songs of all time; and who better to help put that mix together than the one and only "Weird Al" Yankovic?

On this week's show, the comedian and song-spoofer-extraordinaire joins host Robin Hilton and NPR's Stephen Thompson to share classics like Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" as well as more fringe discoveries like "Just A Temp" by The Hazzards, "Going to Pasadena" from Fun With Animals and more.

Featured artists and songs:

1. Tonio K: "H-A-T-R-E-D" 2. Robbie Fulks: "Fountains of Wayne Hotline" 3. Tenacious D: "Tribute" 4. Spike Jones: "Der Fuehrer's Face" 5. Bill Oddie: "BLIMPHT" 6. The Hazzards: "Just A Temp" 7. Garfunkel and Oates: "Google" 8. Tom Lehrer: "The Elements" 9. Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Erika Henningsen, Ashley Park & Busy Philipps: "Famous 5eva" 10. Flight of the Conchords: "Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous (Featuring Rhymenocerous And The Hiphopapoatumus)" 11. Shel Silverstein: "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take The Garbage Out" 12. Weird Al: "One More Minute" 13. Weird Al: "The Saga Continues" 14. Bad Lip Reading: "Seagulls! (Stop It Now)" 15. Fun With Animals: "Goin' To Pasadena" 16. Spinal Tap: "Big Bottom" 17. The Lonely Island: "Lazy Sunday"

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"Weird Al" Yankovic Reacts To Seeing Daniel Radcliffe Portray Him

"Weird Al" Yankovic was under a spell watching Daniel Radcliffe portray him onscreen.

The parody song artist said it was "pretty crazy" how well the Harry Potter alum channeled him while filming his biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, especially one moment where the resemblance looked particularly uncanny.

"The first scene that we shot the first day was in the apartment with the band where he comes up with the idea for 'My Bologna,'" Yankovic exclusively told E! News, "and just watching on the monitors, there are some shots and some angles where it just really looked like me."

Yankovic shared that shooting the movie felt like "watching scenes from my actual life."

"It was just an odd experience for me, and it was that way through the whole shoot," Yankovic said. "You kind of get used to it after a while, but just that first moment of like, 'Wow, that's Daniel Radcliffe playing me.' That's kind of hard to wrap my head around."

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