“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.”

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’m a music fan, and I can listen to the radio, or music, without thinking, “How am I going to screw this up?” [Laughs] If I’m really actively trying to think of a parody, then I’ll have my antenna out, and be a little more proactive about it.

If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I’d love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career.

Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.

I don’t like to label myself. I know I’m very hard to pigeonhole.

Velvet Elvis never puts on weight.

I think my chances of ever making it into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame are about as good as Milli Vanilli’s.

I can’t say enough good things about my band. I feel very fortunate that I found them when I did, very early in my career.

A woman in Santa Barbara, California, sent a $40,000 check. I fondled it for about five minutes and then sent it back. I told her I couldn’t accept money from strangers.

Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.

The image and the costs of a Berlin-like wall or a Great Wall of China is something that the American people have not accepted to date.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Failure is enriching. It’s also important to accept that you’ll make mistakes – it’s how you build your expertise.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

I went to Performing Arts because that was the only school that would accept me. My scholastic level was not very high.

It normally takes decades to build a brand… It’s the forgetting of the old truth that allows a person to accept a new truth.