“It fit pretty nicely into my schedule because we’d pretty much finished the bulk of promotion for Mandatory Fun and were just getting geared up for the World Tour so this was a nice time for me to be working on it.”

I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art!

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.

People that were a little nerdy in high school would look up to me and know it gets better.

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.

Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they’re not all good!

My brothers and sisters hated me because I was an only child.

Not only are they just great, nice guys; they’re some of the best musicians you’re likely to find.

So then why get upset if somebody like me Tries to look at the world just a bit differently?

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?

In fact, when I come up with an idea for a parody I try to resist the urge to Google the idea to see if someone has done it already because the answer is almost always, “Yes, of course they have, they’ve thought of it!”

People say releasing an album is like giving birth, but it’s more like having a gallbladder operation.

I’m very analytical, I’m very precise.

I think that was the genesis of my polka medleys, because every rock song I played on the accordion just sounded like a polka and my friends thought it was funny.

Midget wrestling on channel 3, it costs me 50 bucks a month.

I like the guitar-driven music of Nirvana at its peak. At that point, I thought there was a lot of really exciting music coming out.

And then I’ll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

I don’t want to be bulky and stiff.

The bulk of my fans are my age, and I’m aging at the same rate they are. That makes me relevant. They like hearing what I have to say. I work hard at it, but it’s addicting, really.

The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.