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.
AL YANKOVICAs a kid, I certainly never thought I would get to spend my life doing something fun.
More Al Yankovic Quotes
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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.
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It’s very much a “Weird Al” themed issue, so I’d like to think that there’s a lot of “Weird Al” flavor throughout but I think it’d be generous really to call me an editor.
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I am not making this up. Needless to say, as soon as I discovered that, I gave up meat entirely.
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One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don’t realize there’s a lot of craft behind the comedy.
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I cut my teeth playing rock songs on the accordion when I was a teenager and my friends always thought that was extremely amusing.
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I don’t want to pooh-pooh modern pop. I appreciate that as well, but my personal favorite kind of music is guitar-based rock. I like grunge and garage bands and alternative music, but that’s more my personal taste.
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Because you’re supposed to lose yourself in the character, but sometimes people look at a character and go “Oh, it’s ‘Weird Al.'”
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By the time I’m in the studio recording my parody, 10,000 parodies of that song are on YouTube.
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And then I’ll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
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I enjoy all kinds of music. But it is kind of strange when I do parodies, instead of setting up drums and guitar amps.
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It’s hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
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Left all my Beatle records out in the sun, got a coke bottle stuck on the end of my tongue.
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So that’s why one of my rules of parody writing is that it’s gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
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In a genre where most of the artists are one-hit wonders, I’ve been able to hang around longer than most “serious” acts. I pride myself in being a very talented leech.
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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.
AL YANKOVIC