The new bio-pic “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” written by Yankovic and Eric Appel, begins with an epigram: “Life is like a parody of your favorite song.” Yankovic’s actual life story has plenty of appeal—accordion-playing child of working-class parents grows up to be the definitive parodist of his time—but, like a Weird Al tune, the movie combines the charm of the real thing with the charm of a wild riff departing from it. It stars Daniel Radcliffe, who knows something about playing a boy with a special gift; here, our young hero navigates a lightly fantastical world of polka parties and pop-star excess. The top-hatted d.j. and novelty-hit king Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson), Yankovic’s real-life idol, reigns over a kind of glamorous comedy-dweeb Shangri-La; Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), who inspired the Weird Al hit “Like a Surgeon,” functions as an Al-obsessed mischief-maker.
Yankovic was born in 1959, and grew up in Lynwood, California. As a bright, precocious kid, he devoured Mad magazine and spent Sunday nights listening to “The Dr. Demento Show,” the invaluable source of songs such as Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” of Camp Granada fame, and Tom Lehrer’s “The Vatican Rag” (“2-4-6-8 / Time to transubstantiate!”). At sixteen, Yankovic recorded a novelty song of his own, about the Belvedere, the family car, and sent the cassette to Dr. Demento, who played it on the air. That same year, Yankovic graduated from high school, as valedictorian, and started college at California Polytechnic State University, where he wrote a sandwich-focussed “My Sharona” parody, “My Bologna.” Dr. Demento played that, too—and it became a hit.
To be a music- and comedy-loving kid in the early eighties was to be continually startled and delighted by Yankovic’s creations. The songs seemed to burst from nowhere, creating a kind of comedic urgency—you had to marvel about them with friends. Their catchiness was matched by their defiantly uncool silliness. Songs fuelled by lust and electric guitar became songs about, say, “I Love Lucy” or ice cream, but you could still dance to them, despite the farty-hand-squeeze percussion. Yankovic’s breakthrough came in 1984, when the video for “Eat It,” a shot-by-shot parody of “Beat It,” gave him a kind of shadow version of Michael Jackson’s success. “Weird,” which is streaming on Roku, builds its narrative around these core beats; in the mid-eighties, its story spins off into comedic delirium, and ends with a bang.
In real life, Yankovic’s career continued—he won Grammys, sold more than twelve million albums, co-wrote and starred in a movie (“UHF”), had a kids’ TV show, directed videos, and kept making new records, riffing on everyone from Nirvana and Miley Cyrus to Pharrell, Lorde, and Chamillionaire. There’s still a timeless pleasure in hearing his transformations, as when the groovy but odious “Blurred Lines” becomes “Word Crimes,” a feisty song about grammar (“You would not use ‘it’s’ in this case!”), or when, as in “Canadian Idiot,” he pairs sly political satire (“And they leave the house without packin’ heat / Never even bring their guns to the mall”) with genial teasing (hoseheads, moose meat). His widely shared videos maintain a golden-era-of-MTV vibe, in which he transforms to fit the joke: Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Tatooine desert, Lady Gaga covered in bees. Most of his live shows have been similarly theatrical, but recently he’s been performing a stripped-down tour, for the true heads. I caught up with him over Zoom, while he was on a tour bus, “somewhere in Florida.” Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
How’s the tour going?
It’s going great. We’re on the home stretch. It wraps up at the end of this month, and it’s a six-month tour. We’re loving being out on the road, but it’s also going to be nice to unplug for a little bit at the end.
And then to welcome the movie into the world—which, I have to tell you, I loved. It was so funny, so smart. I’ve been immersed in your whole catalogue again, and it’s been so much fun.
That’s so sweet, thank you!
I love the story, in the film, of your listening to Dr. Demento as a kid. Tell me about your childhood, and your relationship to music and parody growing up.
There’s certainly nuggets of truth in the movie, because I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. My parents, Nick and Mary Yankovic, were both very supportive, though—much unlike the movie. And they decided when I was, I think, six years old that I should take accordion lessons, because a door-to-door accordion salesman came around, offering music lessons. He said, “Your child can learn guitar or accordion.” And my parents, being visionaries, thought, Oh, young Alfred would love to play the accordion! Imagine that, he’d be the life of any party.
Did they like accordion music themselves? I was intrigued to learn about Frankie Yankovic—this famous accordion-playing Yankovic who’s not you.
I mean, I can’t say that they played polka around the house constantly, but they appreciated it. And they were well aware of Frank Yankovic, but as far as we could tell there’s no relation. I got to meet Frankie in the mid-eighties, and we were friends until his passing. But, yeah, I think the fact that my parents were aware of him and possibly even had some of his records may have played into their decision to give me accordion lessons.
And, when you started playing the accordion, did you enjoy it? Was it really hard?
I suppose I liked it. I was very young, obviously. I can’t imagine I was begging my parents for accordion lessons. I guess it’s kind of a hard instrument to learn.
It seems like it.
That became apparent when I tried to teach Daniel Radcliffe how to play the accordion. It’s one of those things—it’s helpful if you learn it early, when your synapses are firing very quickly. It’s sort of like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time to be able to play, like, piano keyboards, and then buttons with the other hand, and then at the same time moving bellows in and out. There’s a lot to think about.
Kind of like the bagpipes, where you’re piping and also generating the wind from the bag.
Right, bagpipes—that means the accordion is only the second most obnoxious instrument.
People have passionate feelings about both. So you also read Mad magazine and liked comedy when you were little, right?
I saw my first Mad magazine when I was maybe eleven or twelve years old, and it was an epiphany for me. I thought, This is my kind of humor. This was something that I hadn’t been exposed to. I immediately subscribed, and I begged my mother to take me around town to all the used-book-and-magazine stores to buy back issues. There was no Internet back then, so we scoured Los Angeles County, finding these old issues of Mad. And that’s where I learned a lot about pop culture. I couldn’t see a lot of the movies that Mad parodied, but I got to experience them through the warped perspective of the Mad magazine writers. So it was my education in that kind of comedy.
I was thinking about Mad and your work—the magazine did such close, detail-by-detail movie parodies, like you did later with videos. I’ve still never seen “Ordinary People,” but I read the Mad parody as a kid, and I felt like I learned exactly what the movie was doing seriously and well, scene by scene, and, simultaneously, the ways in which it was too serious, and the ways in which it could and should be mocked. So that’s a good education for a parodist.
To this day, there are a number of movies that I don’t think I’ve actually seen, but I feel like I’ve seen them, because I read the Mad magazine piece. So that was a window to a world that I wasn’t able to experience when I was a very young child.
Were you a little bit sheltered, or—
I mean, I’m an only child. And my parents, particularly my mother, were very protective, and I’m thankful that they loved me enough to want to be that protective. But it was also a little stifling at times. It was difficult for me to have a social life, because my parents weren’t really comfortable with me going to my friends’ houses or hanging out if they weren’t supervising me. But I had an over-all very happy childhood and very loving parents. I certainly can’t complain.
You were often a little younger than your peers, too, if you skipped second grade.
Yeah, I started kindergarten a little early, and then I skipped second grade into third grade. So I started high school at twelve and started college when I was sixteen. And I don’t know if that really affected me all that much, honestly, because regardless of the age difference I was still a total nerd. I was not a popular kid, I was not a social kid. I was always a little bit ostracized, because I didn’t quite fit in.
And that was when nerds were nerds. It wasn’t as cool to be a nerd.
No. Nowadays people brag about their nerd cred, and that was not the case when I was in high school. That was a different world.
What stands out in the comedy and parody you liked growing up? Are there particular songs you remember loving from Dr. Demento’s show?
Dr. Demento exposed me to a ton of stuff that I had not heard before. The four artists that I typically count as my Mount Rushmore of comedy influences would be Spike Jones, Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer, and Stan Freberg. They were all amazing in their own way, and very inspirational. And I got to work with Stan Freberg. I got to cast him on my CBS Saturday-morning kids’ show. That was a real treat to hold onto—one of my actual heroes.
I don’t know him. What were his big songs?
He did a lot of albums in the forties and fifties, and then he sort of segued into advertising—he did a lot of the most famous early funny TV ads. But his most famous album was probably “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,” which was basically a skewed retelling of the story of America. He also did a number of parodies: there was a single called “John and Marsha,” which was a take on soap operas. He lampooned culture and music and TV. And he had a radio show for a very brief time, which was also very popular.
You did really well in school—you were the valedictorian of your high school, and then went to college to study architecture. And you had a radio show in college?
In my sophomore year, I took a shift on the campus radio station, KCPR, San Luis Obispo, and it started out normal enough. But I took on the name Weird Al because everybody seemed to have some kind of wacky air name. Weird Al seemed appropriate, since that’s what they were already calling me in the dorms. And slowly my show sort of evolved into a surrogate “Dr. Demento Show.”
Yeah, I was wondering.
I was playing more and more strange music, until I was almost exclusively playing bizarre tracks from my personal collection, which I think the program director of the station wasn’t that fond of. And eventually I was kind of forced off the air because I wasn’t toeing the line.
What were you supposed to be playing?
Well, during the years that I was on, the logic was that college is supposed to prepare you for the real world. Instead of being experimental, you needed to follow a very strict format, because that’s what they do at real radio stations. So we had to play so many albums with a yellow dot on them and so many albums with a red dot on them—
Are you serious?!
—which I kind of rebelled against. Yeah! And I can see the logic in that, but college is one of the few times in life when you really get to play around and experiment. And I thought that that experience was being taken away from a lot of kids.
Yeah, for sure. And I think of college radio as being, at least when I was a teen-ager, where you could hear the good stuff that wasn’t on mainstream FM radio. Were you a fan of regular pop music growing up? Obviously, you have an encyclopedic knowledge of pop hits.
I grew up on pop radio. When I was a teen-ager in Los Angeles, I would listen to KHJ, the Big Boss Top Forty AM radio station, and later on I got into FM radio and listened to stations like KMET, which was an album-oriented rock station that had “The Dr. Demento Show” live on Sunday nights. So all week long I would listen to rock radio, and Sunday night was sort of the dessert at the end.
I listened to Dr. Demento growing up, too—that’s where you learned a lot of important stuff about funny music.
He’s not on terrestrial radio anymore, but he still does a show on the Internet. He’s still going strong.
I’m curious about what you like to parodize when you’re writing a song and what you want to stay away from. What is it that you have fun making fun of?
Pretty much anything is fair game. The challenge for me was always trying to figure out new ways to be funny, because I found myself, early on, falling back on the same tropes, like writing a lot of songs about food. And that became painfully clear when my record label decided to release an entire album of songs about food—O.K., maybe I better think outside the box a little bit more.
I obviously try to satirize pop culture as much as possible. And in the last few albums I got a bit into Internet culture, as well. I just try to stay away from things that would age poorly, politics being one of them, because not only does it age poorly but certainly these days it’s very divisive to do political humor. It’s not that I’m not a political person, but I tend to stay away from that.
That said, I got a kick out of your C.I.A. song, “Party in the CIA.” It’s a little sly in a really fun way.
Thank you.
It’s interesting—it makes you hear the songs anew, when you hear your version of them. You realize how much pleasure there is in the original, but also how much pleasure there is in being freed from whatever it is that song is doing. Take “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which I love—but there’s something wonderfully liberating about hearing what you did with it, and just kind of chuckling about old Kurt. You know what I mean?
Yeah. The more serious that an artist takes themselves, the easier it is to lampoon them, because it doesn’t take much to pop the bubble of pretentiousness. And thankfully they have a good sense of humor about it, too. But there are some songs that people are just, like, waiting for the Weird Al treatment: “Oh, Al’s going to step in and, like, take this down a peg.”
Any examples?
Well, I don’t know. I will say that sometimes my parody didn’t work so well, because I was parodying something that was already perceived as not all that serious. Like, I’ve done parodies of the Presidents of the United States of America and Barenaked Ladies. I’m a fan of both those groups. And neither one takes themselves all that seriously, and some people said that doing parodies of them was redundant or unnecessary.
I don’t know. Most artists in pop culture are very serious. And I’m serious about what I do, as well, but it’s a different kind of thing. I’m serious about being silly.
And a smaller percentage of your songs is more directly making fun of the song itself or the artist. Maybe the Lady Gaga one—
And Billy Ray Cyrus [“Achy Breaky Song”] and “Smells Like Nirvana.” There’s very few songs in my catalogue that are about the song or the artist, and I guess those would be considered true satire. Most of my songs are basically riffing on a song, and would be considered parody. But I always like to make sure that the artist and songwriters feel respected.
Getting back to your biography—after you wrote “My Bologna,” based on the Knack’s “My Sharona,” you did actually meet the band’s singer, right? And he helped you make some connections?
That is a true story. I had submitted my tape of “My Bologna” to Dr. Demento. It was recorded in a public restroom, as in the movie, because of the nice, warm tiled-reverb sound in there. Dr. Demento played it on the radio, and it was my first bonafide hit on his show—it was, like, No. 1 on his Funny Five countdown for several weeks. And a few months later the Knack actually played at Cal Poly, where I was going to school, and somehow I worked my way backstage and met Doug Fieger, the lead singer, and he knew who I was. He said, “Oh, it’s the ‘My Bologna’ guy!” And he turned to the person standing next to him and said, “This is the guy who did ‘My Bologna.’ You should put it out on Capitol Records.” And the person he was talking to was Rupert Perry, then vice-president of Capitol Records.
Ha!
He said, “O.K., sure!” So they actually put out my song as a single on Capitol Records—sort of as a goof, really, because they never thought, Oh, this guy’s got a career, he’s a Capitol recording artist now. It was mostly just to placate the band and have a laugh, I think.
And then what happened?
My next hit was “Another One Rides the Bus,” which we never officially recorded. That was performed live on “The Dr. Demento Show.” Dr. Demento just happened to have his reel-to-reel tape recorder running for an air check, so it preserved that live performance. That is still the recording that you hear on the albums.
Backing up a little, what was it like hearing yourself on Dr. Demento for the first time? You were in high school, and it was a song about your family car.
The first time I heard my song on the radio—again, it’s sort of like it was in the movie, and in every single bio-pic, it’s just a cliché—my initial thought was, Did I turn on my tape machine? And then I realized, No, this is actually coming out of the radio. Everybody can hear this! And I think at that point I started running around the house screaming, like, “Mom, Dad, I’m on the radio!”
Did they listen, too?
Oh, sure. You know, as my career went on, they were always very proud and happy. My dad took such joy in it. He used to go up to the checkout person at the grocery store and show them my senior picture, like, “Ever hear of Weird Al? That’s my son!”
It’s interesting the way your early career dovetailed with the rise of MTV. What was the moment like when you really hit it big?
That would be “Eat It.” MTV had played a couple of my earlier videos—“Ricky,” the parody of Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” was my first video, as well as, I believe, the first comedy video MTV ever played. That would have been ’83, the same year “I Love Rocky Road” came out on MTV. And they both did fine. I think a few people saw them, but it didn’t really change my life in any way.
But, when “Eat It” came out the following year, that was a life-changing moment, because it went into heavy rotation. And this is back when everybody was watching MTV—if you weren’t watching, it was on in your house, like video wallpaper. And to get heavy rotation on MTV, to have your song and video played eight times a day, that was a huge thing. The day after it went into heavy rotation, people were stopping and pointing at me and saying, “Isn’t that the ‘Eat It’ guy?” So my life changed almost immediately.
You had such a distinctive look in the early days—the Hawaiian shirt, the hair, the mustache, the glasses. Were you recognized all over the place, or did you present yourself differently in your regular life?
Yeah, I guess I was sort of a walking cartoon character. I mean, that was not calculated at all. That was just the way I looked, and it became an image and a brand. To this day, even though I haven’t looked that way for decades, when kids dress up like me for Halloween it’s still the eighties look, with the glasses and the mustache. I don’t know what the attraction was. That’s just the way my hair looked, and I needed glasses. I don’t know how the mustache came about—I think I was just impressed that I could grow one. And I always liked loud shirts. It’s just, I’ve always been out of fashion, so I don’t have to worry about being in fashion.
There was a huge laugh in the theatre when the Hawaiian shirt was revealed, hidden behind the bed. But it must have been strange, being recognized everywhere, and being thrust into the same realm as the people you were parodying. Did you start meeting all those rock stars?
Yeah. And that was a little odd for me, because I kind of enjoyed my outsider status. I was just a weird punk kid making fun of all these pop stars in the inner élite circle. And after “Eat It” I was winning Grammys, I was presenting at awards shows, and I was travelling in some of the same circles as these people. I was suddenly inside the bubble.
What was it like in there?
The eighties are a bit of a blur. But whenever I met somebody it was always very positive. They were usually happy to meet me. And every once in a while somebody would say, “When are you going to get around to doing one of my songs?” I’m not sure how serious they are in the moment, but it’s always nice to hear. My favorite all-time meeting was when I met Paul McCartney, in 1984. That just blew my mind, because I’ve always been a huge Beatles fan, and of Paul in particular. I walked up to him at a party, and before I could finish introducing myself, he said, “Oh, it’s Weird Al!” I don’t think there’s a moment in my life that surpassed that.
How could there be? Speaking of Beatles, I listened again to “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long,” and I was laughing to myself—I loved George Harrison’s version [“Got My Mind Set on You”] when it came out, but I remember thinking, He really repeats a lot in this song. I love that you had some fun with that. Did you interact with him about the song?
No, because that was a cover of a song written by an artist named Rudy Clark—a song from the early sixties that George just happened to like, so we didn’t have to go to George for that. But I’m now friends with his son, Dhani, and Dhani tells me that George was actually a fan of mine, which, again, I cannot even conceive of that being true. He said that George liked my movie “UHF.”
That’s wonderful. Going back to the bio-pic, I was excited to learn about the story of Daniel Radcliffe’s casting. Tell me about seeing him do a TV appearance where he sings a Tom Lehrer song.
I saw his appearance on “The Graham Norton Show,” from 2010. He was obviously a bit younger, and he chose to perform the “Elements” song, by Lehrer, which is basically all the elements in the periodic table, set to the famous show tune by Gilbert and Sullivan [“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General”]. And the fact that he wanted to memorize that—that means automatically he’s a huge nerd, just like me. I memorized the “Elements” song and performed it in college at coffeehouses. And the fact that he did that, and did it on national TV, in front of, like, Rihanna and Colin Farrell—I thought, O.K., this guy’s a kindred spirit.
I love how he’s, like, “Any Tom Lehrer fans in the house?” And no one seems to have any idea what he’s talking about, but he politely explains and barrels along. The song must be really hard to do, too—most lyrics follow a narrative progression, but that song is really just naming a lot of elements.
It’s rote memorization, which is something that Daniel is very good at.
Incidentally, I had a funny Tom Lehrer experience in high school. I was on the school literary magazine, and we were going through the archives for an anniversary issue, and I found a very clever poem from the forties by a guy named Tom Lehrer. It turned out to be him.
No kidding!
Yeah! And it was charming and brilliant, and we of course included it. But I was baffled that it wasn’t better known in my high school that this genius had gone there.
I almost went to U.C. Santa Cruz because Tom Lehrer was teaching there. I went to Cal Poly, ultimately, because I was trying to be an architect, and I don’t think Santa Cruz had an architecture program. But I thought, How can I pass up being Tom Lehrer’s student?
Have you ever met him? He’s not very out in the world, from what I understand.
I call him the J. D. Salinger of funny music. I’ve never met him in person; we’ve exchanged a few e-mails. He was also a big fan of the movie “UHF,” and he quoted some of the lines from the movie back to me.
Wow.
And I asked him—at the same time that I got Stan Freberg to be on my Saturday-morning show—if he wanted to be in. I said, “You don’t even have to be on camera. We’ll have a character called the Guy Behind a Wall.” So all you do is hear his voice. And even that—he had walked away from show business. I think his famous line was “I realized political satire was dead when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Whoa.
So he’s retired.
“Weird” is especially good at depicting musical inspiration—usually, in bio-pics, those scenes are cringeworthy. Like, in “The Doors,” when they’re trying to write “Light My Fire,” they’re fiddling around with that famous melody, and it just feels so awkward, you know? The way you do those moments in the film is so self-aware and funny.
Thank you. Obviously, we’re exaggerating everything, because it’s hard to capture true moments of inspiration. If you were to have a camera on me when I’m thinking of an idea, it’d just be me walking around the house with a glazed look on my face. My wife calls it my zombie period. It’s not a real cinematic thing to show.
Do you watch bio-pics? Were there particular elements of the form that you wanted to satirize?
Oh, yeah. I watch them anyway, but Eric [Appel, the director and co-writer] and I revisited a lot of them in the writing process to reacquaint ourselves with the tropes. There are certain beats that they all have, and it wasn’t that hard to think, Oh, O.K., how do we tweak this beat? One is how they telescope time. A lot of bio-pics conflate several things into one night, like, Oh, the night they play the song is the night that they got signed to the record deal and the night that they got this phone call. So we played a little bit with, like, Oh, I just mailed the tape five minutes ago, and already it’s on the radio.
One of the more sublime scenes takes place at a grotto, at a comedy pool party after you first meet Dr. Demento. Was that inspired by the “Boogie Nights” pool scene?
Yes.
Which is also a great scene, in a straightforward way. But this—all those characters were so fun to see in one place, and who they were played by was another layer of fun. Like, I never would have imagined Conan O’Brien as Andy Warhol. How did you envision that scene?
That was the scene that we were the most nervous about, because there’s so much stuff that could go wrong. For that particular scene, I was the unofficial casting director, because I got to go through my address book and make a list of all the celebrities that I knew. I would show them to Eric and be, like, “What do you think? Who should we get for what?” I was amazed that pretty much everybody wanted to be in it. There were a few people that had other obligations, but almost everyone that I approached was, like, “Yeah, I’ll be there.”
It was so much fun to see, like, a Gallagher and a Salvador Dalí and a Tiny Tim at a pool party. Were there people that you wanted to include in the scene but couldn’t?
We had to shave it down a little bit. Initially, we had Cheech and Chong in the movie, and Steve Martin in the movie, and a few others. But part of being able to do it on the budget that we had was telling the story in as concise a way as possible.
I know that pool party is a funny fantasy, but did Dr. Demento actually have some kind of social scene then—parties where you would meet his other comedy friends?
No, not as such. Although being on the show was sort of like a party. He would invite me and a bunch of like-minded fans, and we would man the phone lines and take requests and make noise.
What was it like working with Daniel Radcliffe?
It was amazing. Eric and I took a Zoom meeting with him back when we first offered him the role, and we were amazed that he was into it. I mean, it was sort of blue sky for us—before we approach other people, let’s see if Daniel Radcliffe will do it. He was totally on board. It turns out he was a fan of mine. I knew he was a big comedy fan. And there wasn’t anybody I could think of that could pull off the role better than him.
He was a joy every step of the way. You know, he and Evan Rachel Wood and Rainn Wilson and everybody knew we had to get it done quickly. So everybody was on their A game, and we got everything in one, two, or three takes, because we had to.
Why did you have to do it so fast?
Our shooting schedule was eighteen days, so, if we didn’t pull off everything we needed in a given day, there weren’t any extra days to make it up. The production budget was, I believe, eight million—not chump change, but not a big Hollywood-movie budget. So we had to be very smart about making sure that we weren’t overshooting. If we weren’t working with an amazing crew and cast, we would not have been able to pull it off.
Was Madonna creatively involved in any way? What was the situation there?
The lawyers told us that we didn’t need to—and, in fact, probably shouldn’t—get permission from any of the people that we were putting in the movie, because they’re all public figures and fair game. You know, for what it’s worth, Madonna, back in 1985, before my parody came out, told a friend of hers, “Oh, I wonder when Weird Al’s going to do ‘Like a Surgeon,’ ” and her friend happened to know my manager. So word got back to me. And I thought, Oh, not a bad idea. I guess I will. So the idea actually came from her. We took that little tiny nugget of truth and expanded it into this whole psychotic story line.
What are your hopes for the movie? Do you feel like you’ve been connecting with younger audiences?
Yeah. It seems that every time that I put out a new album, a new generation starts to discover me. It’s been a while since I put out an album, but hopefully this movie will cause people to go down a rabbit hole and find some stuff that I did earlier in my career. Maybe it will start a whole Weird Al cinematic universe. There might be a “Weird 2: Even Weirder.” Who knows?
I heard about a kid who didn’t know the song “American Pie” but knew your “Star Wars” take on it. It’s inconceivable to me that somebody wouldn’t know “American Pie,” but, of course, lots of people probably don’t. How do you decide to work with an older song like that or “MacArthur Park”?
I would do a parody of an older song only if I could match it with a subject matter that was topical—for “MacArthur Park,” I paired that with “Jurassic Park,” which was the big movie at the time. And, since you brought it up, I will say that when I did “The Saga Begins,” my “American Pie” parody, it was a big hit on Radio Disney. So all these young kids were hearing it, and they didn’t know it was a parody of a 1971 song by Don McLean. They just thought, Oh, this is a funny Weird Al song about “Star Wars.” And the next year, when Madonna did, like, a dance version of “American Pie,” all these same kids were going, “Why is Madonna doing an unfunny version of a Weird Al song?”
Ha ha! I love the trajectory of your relationship with Madonna.
I’d like to see how I’m represented in her bio-pic.
Well, she liked the “Like a Surgeon” experience, I would assume.
The only time that I’ve actually met Madonna was backstage, at the Universal Amphitheatre, after one of her shows there in 1985. They were presenting her with a gold album or something, and I got to walk up to her for about half a minute and introduce myself. She was aware of my parody, of course, and she thought it was funny. But that’s the extent of our actual relationship.
When you decide what a song is going to be about, do you then do a lot of research to get the details right? And do you enjoy that?
Yeah. I’m very passionate about my music, so I’m going to make sure that everything I write about is researched thoroughly. Some require more research than others. When I did “Living with a Hernia,” I didn’t really know about hernias, so I went to the library and just researched hernias for a week. But, like, “White & Nerdy,” I didn’t need to do hardly any research, because I spent my whole life doing research on that song.
That really came from the heart.
__ __[Laughs.] Yeah.
I really enjoyed “Foil,” the riff on Lorde’s “Royals.” The beginning stuff about food safety is amazing, and then in the next section you really take it up a level.
It takes a bit of a turn, doesn’t it?
Yeah, in a really satisfying way. I’m interested in how the themes of a song interact with its structure—like, a key change introducing a new mood or a new idea.
It sure is part of the puzzle. There are certain parts of a song where a key moment happens, and you have to lean into that. You have to figure out, like, O.K., I’ve got to accentuate that somehow—it’s got to be a big joke. And that’s not that easy to do, because some songs have a lot of moving parts. Especially when I’m doing a rap song, some of them have a lot of internal rhymes and a lot of structure that maybe you don’t notice on first listen. But when you start deconstructing you go, “Oh, this is actually very complicated.” It becomes a much harder puzzle to solve.
Hip-hop is interesting because it’s often already playing with an existing song. Like, in “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Coolio did something different with “Pastime Paradise,” and then you were doing yet another thing in “Amish Paradise.” Also, the music in your work is so good in itself, which is part of what makes it satisfying. Do you feel like you’ve learned a lot about pop music as the years have gone by? And has your own music changed?
I think I’ve got better over the years. I firmly believe that my last seven albums are better than my first seven albums. It’s just practice. I’ve had the same band since the very beginning. They’ve been with me for forty years. And they’re a big part of my success, because they’re able to play any genre I throw at them and just absolutely nail it.
What have you been playing on tour?
On this, the Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour—it’s a return to the tour that we did in 2018, which was very experimental. I just wondered if people would show up if I did a tour that was almost completely devoid of parody songs. It’s still a funny show—my original material, but without the hits and the costume changes and the big screen and all that. It’s literally just the band sitting onstage on stools. But, for the fans who have been waiting for me to play some obscure deep cut from my fourth album, this is the chance to hear it. So we’re getting a lot of the hardcore fans showing up for these non-hits, which is gratifying, because we haven’t played those songs for a very long time. And we get to feel more like musicians onstage rather than, you know, jumping around like idiots. I enjoy that, as well, but this is a different muscle to exercise.
So these are songs that are on your albums, but are not parodies of existing songs.
Yeah, about half of my material is original, and then some of those songs are pastiches—they’re meant to sound like another artist or a particular genre, but it’s an original composition. One of our biggest pastiche hits is “Dare to Be Stupid,” which is meant to sound like Devo. I think a lot of people heard that for the first time because it was in an animated “Transformers” movie, back in the eighties. And I do a lot of pastiches of my favorite bands, whether or not people are even aware of what I’m doing. I’ve done a couple songs that sound like Tonio K., who’s one of my favorite artists, but most people these days probably wouldn’t even know who Tonio K. is. Some of my tributes are a bit more obvious: “Craigslist” is meant to sound like the Doors, so I’m trying to do my best Jim Morrison impression. I go into a long rant in the middle of the song.
In the movie, the rant onstage that Radcliffe does—is that a Jim Morrison thing, too?
It is very much a riff on the Miami-Dade County arrest of Jim Morrison. I found it online, and I gave it to Daniel Radcliffe.
You’ve been interviewed a lot over the years. Are there things that you wish you got asked about that you don’t?
I don’t feel like I’ve been stifled in any way. I’m a pretty private person, so I tend not to talk a lot about my personal life, and I tend to stay out of politics. I feel like I’ve been asked all the questions I really need to be asked in this life.
Fair enough. But you’re still having fun, right?
Oh, my goodness. Every single day, I wake up and I can’t believe I still get to be Weird Al. It’s such an unlikely thing that’s happened to my life. I can’t believe that I’ve been able to make a living doing the very specific thing that I love to do. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
