When I started out, I didn’t feel like I was really accepted in the music or comedy communities, and I was somewhere on the edge, but now I feel like I’m accepted in both, which is extremely gratifying.
It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I’ve ever done, so it’s a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.
What kind of morons do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist’s performance on whether or not they had a good seat?
About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.
Not any specific one, but I was a huge fan of Frank Jacobs, I guess he wrote the plurality of the song parodies for MAD, Sam Hart, a few others, but that was also where I was first exposed to the art form of song parodies.
I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I’ll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points.
At this point I’ve got a bit of a track record. So people realize that when ‘Weird Al’ wants to go parody, it’s not meant to make them look bad… it’s meant to be a tribute.
One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.
