"Weird Al" Yankovic is more than just a novelty — though his catalog is full of wacky oddities. A beloved and iconic figure, Yankovic has earned five GRAMMY Awards for his unique blend of satire and sound.
His career as a melodious humorist began with airplay on the "Doctor Demento" radio show in the late 1970s, and he signed with Scotti Bros. Records’ in 1982 just a few months after the fledgling MTV network hit the airwaves. His inspired parodies of Michael Jackson’s "Beat It" (As "Eat It") and Madonna’s "Like A Virgin" ("Like A Surgeon"), which was actually the Material Girl’s idea, made him a star. The hit train has kept on rolling, with send ups of Greg Kihn Band ("I Lost On Jeopardy"), Nirvana ("Smells Like Nirvana"), Coolio ("Amish Paradise"), and Pharrell Williams ("Tacky"). Over his 40-year career, Yankovic has done polka medleys, style parodies, and even some originals. But the song lampoons get the most attention – they’re welcome hit jobs.
Most musicians feel honored to be parodied by Weird Al, who always seeks permission to cover a song in his own inimitable way — with his distinct vocals and new lyrics that offer a funny take on an unrelated topic while fitting the cadence and rhyme scheme of the original. He has received 17 GRAMMY nominations, including his latest nod for Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media for his late 2022 mock biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story starring Daniel Radcliffe. The film’s soundtrack features an original score from Zach Robinson and Leo Birenberg, re-recorded Weird Al hits, and the new song "Now You Know."
Weird is fun in many ways, not least because the slim jokester (who served as co-writer and co-producer), reimagined himself as a buff, party animal rock star. The film plays fast and loose with Yankovic's life, including poetic liberties like dating Madonna, many diva moments, an entanglement with Pablo Escobar, and attempts to win over his disapproving father.
It’s impressive and heartening that this accordion-slinging satirist has gotten to such a level of success. That has included directing videos for himself and other artists, doing voiceovers on animated shows like "Teen Titans Go!" and "Bojack Horseman," writing a children’s book (2011’s When I Grow Up), collaborating with composer Wendy Carlos on a humorous recording of Peter and the Wolf, and portraying Ted Nugent on an episode of "Reno 911!" He even made a recent cameo in the Broadway show "Gutenberg! The Musical." The list goes on.
Ahead of the 2024 GRAMMYs, Yankovic discussed his music, memorable career moments, and how he has evolved over the decades.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What kind of an accordion collection do you own? Do you have accordions from different countries?
I don't know where they're from exactly. I think most accordions are actually made in Italy. The Hohner ones are probably [from] Germany, but most of my favorite accordions are just ones that I found in swap meets and thrift shops and things like that.
By and large, they don't make accordions the size that I like anymore. Most professional accordions are big and fairly heavy, and the ones I like to play are medium size. They call them student models, or the more sexist term, lady's model. Even though they have all the keys and buttons, but they're lightweight enough that I can jump around on stage with them. The accordion that I've been using mostly for the last several years was something that I picked up for 300 bucks on Craigslist. I showed up at some guy's house – "Here's your money."
I was recently watching The Compleat Al, your 1985 video collection with mockumentary wraparound segments, and a prelude to the biopic. Then there was your starring turn in the cult favorite UHF with pre-fame Fran Drescher, Michael Richards, and Victoria Jackson.What lessons did you take from those movies when creating the story for Weird?
The biggest lesson that I took was I wanted my second movie to be on a streamer. I was a little gun shy with theatrical releases after UHF [in 1989] because it had been built up and gotten great audience scores. The studio Orion put it out in the middle of a blockbuster summer. And it got absolutely slaughtered. I thought, if it's on a streamer, nobody knows how well it does. As long as most people like it, it's a hit. I like that built-in safety net.
Also, UHF was my first movie, and I was extremely green. I didn't know what I was doing. I learned a lot. I Monday morning quarterbacked that movie for several years after it came out – I should have done this, I should have done that. So the entire process of doing Weird was a bit different. I felt like I was a lot more mature in terms of writing and in terms of producing.
Watching Weird, I thought, I don't think Al's dad was like this. You portrayed him like the tyrannical father in the Twisted Sister video "We’re Not Gonna Take It." What do you think your late parents would have thought of this movie?
I wish they could have seen it. I think they would have gotten a huge kick out of it. Obviously, my parents, particularly my father, were nothing like that. But when you do a musical biopic, you can't have loving supportive parents, obviously, because then your movie is 10 minutes long.
So we had to have a father that was dead set against his innocent child playing an accordion — the devil squeezebox — and that became a big dramatic arc to the movie, trying to earn my parents love …. But that was something we had to do in order to have our Oscar bait biopic.
Did you like the way Weird’s original score came out?
Oh, absolutely. I'm so thrilled with Zach and Leo’s work. They absolutely nailed it. In fact, my only note to them regarding the music was that the first cue and the end credits were way too peppy [because of what was happening onscreen], and they had this cue that was just a very uplifting song and in a major key. So they used the same music, but they did a much more somber arrangement of it that I thought was more appropriate for the scene.
You love Mad Magazine, which you guest edited in 2015, and Z2 Comics recently released a graphic novel collection The Illustrated Al with interesting artist interpretations of your lyrics. Were you surprised at the breadth of interpretations and illustrations in that collection?
That was the point of it. I didn't micromanage anybody. I basically wanted to make sure they got the words right. [Laughs.] But other than that, I picked cartoonists and artists whose work I enjoyed and appreciated. [It’s] the same way when I do an animated music video, I try not to step on their toes creatively.
You were on Oprah’s show back in 1984 when she was still local in Chicago, and that day she had her audience populated with 10 to 12-year old boys. Did it take a while for people to take you more "seriously"?
I suppose so. I learned pretty early on that the hardest core fans were 12 years old and preteen. I read all my fan mail, and a lot of it was literally from 12-year old boys. So I don't know if that's the way I was being marketed, or if at that age kids really learn to enjoy that kind of irreverent humor. It's a running joke with me that I say, "Your favorite Weird Al album is whichever album came out when you were 12 years old."
Nowadays, of course, my fan base is multi-generational, and that's partly because all those 12-year olds have grown up and now they're bringing their kids, and in some cases their grandkids, to shows.
Guitarist Rick Derringer produced your first six albums. How did that association come about? Was it really helpful to have someone that skilled while crafting all those parodies?
It was extremely helpful because I was very green. The way that came about is before I even got a record deal I was trying to get permission to do the song "I Love Rocky Road," which of course is a parody of "I Love Rock and Roll," the Joan Jett hit that was actually a cover of a song by the group called the Arrows [in 1975]. That was written by Alan Merrill and Jake Hooker.
So when we went to get permission from Jake Hooker, he said, "I manage Rick Derringer. Would you be interested in having him work with you, maybe produce your album?" And I was like, "Yeah, of course." So I had a meeting with Rick at a Mexican restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard [in Los Angeles], and we got along great. He agreed to do the first album, and that became my first of six albums [with him].
I assume he did the Van Halen-esque solo on "Eat It"?
The whole solo is, I don't know, 10 seconds long. But I remember Rick did the solo, and he went from being completely dry to being drenched in sweat in under 15 seconds. He put everything into that thing.
Some of your parodies have a lot of musical elements that sound really close to the original recordings. So many of them were done pre-internet. How much musical research did you do, and then how do you avoid sonically plagiarizing?
We weren't sampling them. We did everything from scratch. But I feel very fortunate because I've had the same band for over 40 years, and they are amazing musicians. They know the drill. I would buy them the CD and say, "Here, learn this." Sometimes I changed the key, or sometimes I’d do an edit here and there. But other than that their gig is to try to duplicate it as closely as they can. That's their homework.
If they want to track down the original bass player or keyboard player and say, "What patch did you use here?" Or, "What kind of strings were you using?" They can get granular on it, but that's on them. I work with such caring, professional musicians. I don't know if I should say this, but my drummer John Schwartz will often ask me before a recording session, "You want me to play this exactly like the original recording? Or do you want me to play it right?" [Laughs.] Because if there are things that you would hear that he thinks are maybe mistakes, that he wants to correct, I’ll say, "No, no, play it just like the original one."
I always give credit first and foremost to my band because they make me look good. I like to think I'm a fairly talented musician, but everybody else in my band is like a savant.
Of your big hits, which was the hardest one to construct in the studio?
There are a few that were difficult to put together. I did a Frank Zappa pastiche called "Genius In France," and I remember that being difficult because it was so many different time signatures and tempos. We started with just a drum track, and we had to record that in 19 separate sections. The whole song was done in little bitty sections, and then we had to edit everything together when we were all done. That was probably the most involved from a production standpoint.
How long did your earlier hits like "Eat It" and "Like A Surgeon" take to record?
Fairly quickly. The very first album with "My Bologna" and "I Love Rocky Road," we recorded all the basic tracks in 10 hours. I was a little freaked out because at the time I didn't have a record deal yet, and the whole thing was being done on spec. I was literally working for minimum wage in a mailroom, so I was freaked out by how much studio time cost, and thinking things like, If I take a bathroom break, that's gonna cost me 10 bucks.
By the second album ["Weird Al" Yankovic In 3-D] I slowed down, and by the third album [Dare To Be Stupid] I feel like I was a bit more seasoned. I felt more at home in the studio, and I was taking my time and doing it right.
"Hardware Store" is a song you said you've never done live because the a capella parts in the midsection are so fast and so difficult. Are there any other songs that you found that you really can't replicate live?
There's a handful of songs like that. One of those was "The Hamilton Polka" which I did a couple of years ago. Again, a lot of stacked vocals, a lot of very fast vocals. Even if I can pull it off, I’m not sure that my band, as good as they are, could pull off those fast vocals and keep it all tight. Lin-Manuel Miranda and I got to lip sync that song on "The Tonight Show." But that would be a really tough one to pull off live with any kind of accuracy.
Kurt Cobain supposedly said that Nirvana felt they had made it when you did a parody of them. What was the moment where you thought that you had made it?
I'm going to say it was the time that I went to a party and I walked up to Paul McCartney, and he knew who I was. This was 1984. "Eat It" had just come out. I was just starting to get famous, I guess. I asked a publicist, "Can I meet Paul McCartney?" They're like, "No, no, he's very busy, don't bother him." But this was my one chance to meet a hero of mine, a Beatle, and I'm gonna just see if I can sneak up next to him. In fact, I think Martha Quinn was interviewing him on MTV, so there's some footage of me in the background, my head poking up, like, "Hi."
I finally got to talk to Paul, and he was next to Linda McCartney. I remember he turns to Linda and says, "Look, honey, it's Weird Al." And my brain just exploded. I couldn't believe it.
It’s been nearly a decade since you released your last album, Mandatory Fun. You've talked about the fact that because of all the microcosm subcultures emerging online, it's getting hard to determine what would work for your albums.
I fulfilled my record contract, so I'm not beholden to anybody. There's that monoculture thing that you refer to. There's the fact that I don't like the business model of having to wait until I have 12 songs [recorded] then put them all at once. I like to have the freedom of just putting out tracks and singles whenever I feel like it. Now granted, I haven't done a whole lot of that in the last eight years, but I like having the flexibility.
If I'm being honest about it, even though my last album went to No. 1, album sales are not a great source of income. Even though my last album was ostensibly the biggest of my career, and historically a No. 1 album, it didn't even go gold. In the ‘90s everything I put out went at least gold if not platinum, so it's just a sign of the times.
I'm more focused now. I'm still recording music here and there, but certainly not as much as I was earlier on in my career. I'm more focused now on playing live and doing voice acting and various other TV and film projects.
After all these years, is there anything you think your fans would be surprised to learn about you?
I certainly have a number of joke answers for this, but honestly, no. I can't think of anything really. It's not like my life is an open book, but I don't have any deep, dark secrets or skeletons in my closet or anything like that. Oh, one of my roommates in college was a mass murderer. But other than that...
Did you have any idea at the time that?
Oh, no, no. And a few years later, he went out and killed a bunch of people.
You dodged a bullet.
Yeah. Glad he didn't burn the macaroni and cheese too much.