There’s a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody.
AL YANKOVICThere’s a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody.
AL YANKOVICIn 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!”
AL YANKOVICI 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.
AL YANKOVICBy the time I’m in the studio recording my parody, 10,000 parodies of that song are on YouTube.
AL YANKOVICI guess I lost a little bit of self-esteem that time that you made it with the whole hockey team.
AL YANKOVICProbably 90 percent of my albums have polka medleys.
AL YANKOVICAt 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.
AL YANKOVICThey do everything from gangsta rap to polka music and every genre in between. It’s amazing.
AL YANKOVICI 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.
AL YANKOVICYou fake something until you’re good at it.
AL YANKOVICI’m always a little leery about doing shows where I’m not the headliner because when I first started playing in 1982 I opened for Missing Persons and got pelted for 45 minutes.
AL YANKOVICI knew we were having problems when you put those piranhas in my bathtub again.
AL YANKOVICIt 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.
AL YANKOVICI have a long-standing history of respecting artists’ wishes.
AL YANKOVICAbout 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.
AL YANKOVICI’m obviously not a rapper, and I don’t have any claims to be one, really.
AL YANKOVIC