Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You still have Top 40 radio now, but it's 40 different stations. There aren't many hits that everybody knows, and there aren't many real superstars.
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.
I'm an ugly girl, My face makes you hurl, Sad I have it, I should bag it. Acne everywhere, Unwanted facial hair. I'm a relation to Frankenstein's creation.
I'm free to do what I please, I'm probably not going to do albums. Just because I think releasing tracks as singles is a better way for me to stay topical.
Somebody will come up to me after a show and have me sign their arm, and the next time I see them my autograph has been permanently inscribed on their arm.
I make charts of songs that are good candidates, good targets, so to speak. Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.
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.
I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.
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?
I think I'm equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the "Letters and Tomatoes" column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.
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.
I don't really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I've never been to therapy so there's probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don't know.
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.
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.
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.
My process for the parodies is that I get an idea for a song and then get approval from the artist and then go in and record it and probably try to get it out as soon as possible.
When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.
I do original songs in the style of other artists, where I try to learn all their musical idiosyncrasies and try to do something that sounds like them and yet is a bit more sick and twisted.
I decided that I wanted to be a voice on every animated cartoon in the history of the world - even shows that haven't been on the air for a very long time, that's going to be harder to pull off.
It was difficult to get into my friends' rock bands when I was a teenager. They somehow didn't see the need for an accordion player. That's when I realized that I had to find my own path in life.
I'll bet every great thinker and leader we've got Could see all kinds of things other people could not! So then why get upset if somebody like me Tries to look at the world just a bit differently?
It's hard to say, I picked one of my favorite articles for the MAD vault. Which is one of the features of the Magazine so they don't have to actually pay artists or writers to come up with new stuff.
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.
I was a huge fan of 'Mad' magazine when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. I'd scour used bookstores trying to find back issues, and I'd wait at the newsstand for a new issue to come out. My life revolved around it.
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.
In the '80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they're not all good!
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.
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 did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
I suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, 'OK, this is what I'm going to do for a living and I'm going to be Weird Al.'
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!"
I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.
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 start with a comprehensive list of all the recent songs that have been big hits - and then I go down that list and see if I can come up with funny ideas for them. I can always come up with ideas, but not necessarily good ones!
I've always known that if I recorded an album, it would come out, and people would enjoy it! Whereas if I wrote a movie script, chances are better than even that I'd just be another guy in L.A. with a movie script in his drawer.
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.
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.
Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you'll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to 'The Flintstones?'
Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you'll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to 'The Flintstones'?'
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, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
That's a big part of my life - doing things that I'm not prepared to do. Doing things that I don't know how to do, and keep doing them until I get good at them. I always try to put myself out of my comfort zone and out of my depth, and hopefully somewhere along the line I'll catch up.
Many years ago I found out something about hamburgers that really grossed me out. You may not know this, so I hope I don’t make you sick, but it turns out hamburgers are actually made out of dead cows. I am not making this up. Needless to say, as soon as I discovered that, I gave up meat entirely.
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. On the other hand, I can get all the Metallica songs I want for FREE! WOW!
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. Not only are they just great, nice guys; they're some of the best musicians you're likely to find. They do everything from gangsta rap to polka music and every genre in between. It's amazing.
I'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. After that, I made the decision to headline no matter what, even if I was playing to seven people. I wanted people to be there to see me.
I tend to enunciate pretty well. It's always seemed that my voice is one of those voices that people can recognize pretty easily - which has been a bit of a drawback for some characters because you're supposed to lose yourself in the character, but sometimes people look at a character and go "Oh, it's 'Weird Al.'"
There's a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody. There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea. Some songs are too repetitive for me to be able to fashion a humorous set of lyrics around. Some songs flat-out just don't work creatively for me.
I cut my teeth playing rock songs on the accordion when I was a teenager and my friends always thought that was extremely amusing. 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. So that was a joke that I continue up to this very day.
My own personal tastes don't really have an effect on whether song is a parody target or not. But having said that, I try to pick songs that I actually like because I realize that I have to live with these songs for a long time, from when I'm working on them in the studio to possibly playing them onstage for the rest of my life. So I try not to pick songs that I know would drive me crazy.
I was able to come up with a couple articles for the magazine, I was able to solicit help from a bunch of my friends to contribute pieces: Patton Oswalt, Seth Green, Emo Phillips, Chris Hardwick, John Hodgman, and more. 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.