In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers (and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two) in the process. 

The Musician: “Weird Al” Yankovic crawled his way out of the novelty music ghetto to become a pop icon and one of our most consistent and least likely hitmakers. Few would have pegged the Dr. Demento Show breakout star for longevity when he released his 1983 self-titled debut, but 28 years later, Yankovic is still at the top of his game, artistically and commercially. For nearly three decades, Yankovic has served as a human funhouse mirror that reflects our pop culture’s obsessions and compulsions back to us in agreeably twisted and contorted forms. In a remarkable act of pop-art ventriloquism, Yankovic has been able to slip inside the skins of everyone from Michael Jackson and Madonna to Lady Gaga and Chamillionaire without losing his identity, winning three Grammys (from nine nominations) and scoring six platinum records in the process. He also co-wrote and starred in the cult comedy UHF and created the terrific but under-watched kids program The Weird Al Show. Yankovic recently made headlines when Lady Gaga’s camp first denied, then ultimately granted Yankovic permission to parody “Born This Way” as “Perform This Way,” the first single for Alpocalypse, the pop icon’s first album in five years.  

“Skipper Dan” (from 2011’s Alpocalypse)

“Weird Al” Yankovic: “Skipper Dan” is a bit more poignant than what I usually write. I still think it would qualify as a comedy song, but it’s definitely a little more bittersweet. It’s kind of a character study. I was inspired one time when my family and I actually did go on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland, and the skipper that we had just offhandedly referred to his failed acting career. Immediately, the bells went off in my head, and I thought, “Well, here’s a song right here.” So I created a whole backstory for this guy, and made him a very bitter failed actor who once had a promising career, and now his life has devolved into basically doing a seven-minute bad comedy routine 34 times a day. 

AVC: Do you ever think, “That could have been a path that I may have taken had things not worked out?”

AY: Well, hey, it’s not actually a bad gig. [Laughs.] I don’t want to dis the Jungle Cruise skippers. In fact, I’ve got nothing but positive reinforcement from actual Disney workers. At one point in my life, I probably would have jumped at a gig like that.

“Party In The CIA” (From 2011’s Alpocalypse)

AY: That was just one of those cases where “Party In The U.S.A.” was an omnipresent hit, and I felt like I needed to have a little bit of Miley on the album. I think, someone pointed this out, that this was the first time I ever parodied a father and his daughter during the course of my oeuvre. [Laughs.] I decided if I was going to do a parody of a Miley Cyrus song, I had to make it very dark. That had to be part of the joke: I’m taking this kind of pop, bubblegum-y fluff of a song, and making it very dark and twisted. You’ve heard the song, but you haven’t seen the video yet have you?

AVC: No.

AY: The video is done by Roque Ballesteros, who works for Ghostbot, and they’re the people who do animation like Happy Tree Friends, are you familiar with that at all? It’s like cute, happy little animals, and they get into these ultra-violent adventures. It’s really dark, and I thought, “These are the people who should be doing this video,” because it’s kind of happy and poppy on the surface, but it very quickly goes in a very dark direction.

AVC: Does it feel weird to be parodying songs by teenage girls? Do you feel like there is some weird element of inter-generational ventriloquism?

AY: [Laughs.] It is kind of odd, you know? Assuming the roles of people who don’t share common life experiences with me. But that’s what my whole life is. I assume all these characters, and it doesn’t even strike me as strange that I just shot a video [for “Perform This Way”] last weekend where, ostensibly, I’m a 25-year-old woman. [Laughs.] That’s just the life I’ve chosen, I guess. 

AVC: How did the video shoot go?

AY: It went really well. I can’t wait for you to see it; it’s pretty crazy, and as I said in my blog post, I think people will find it disturbing on many levels. Without giving away too much, it’s pretty crazy and there’s probably more effects in it than any of my other videos to date. I finished editing the video, but now it’s going to be in post for four weeks, and it should be out about the same time the album comes out. 

“Craigslist” (from 2011’s Alpocalypse)

AY: “Craigslist,” yeah. That was obviously my Doors homage. It used to be a three-ringed notebook, and now it’s folders on my laptop, but I keep lists of things, and I keep lists of bands and artists that I think would be fun to at one point do a pastiche of. I also have a list of topics that I think would be kind of fun to tackle. Sometimes, I’ll sit and look at both columns, and I’ll draw a line from column A to column B, and see if anything feels like an amusing juxtaposition. And as soon as my eye went from Doors to “Craigslist,” immediately, I thought that there was something there. That just seemed so wrong, so anachronistic that it struck me as funny. And that was really all I had. I wanted to do a song in the style of The Doors about Craigslist, and my first thought was, “Let’s see if Ray Manzarek will do this.” And we contacted Ray Manzarek and he agreed to it, and based on that, I didn’t even have a concept, I was like, “Eh, let’s do a song about Craigslist,” and he said, “Okay, I’ll play on it.” [Laughs.] I think about a week later he was like, “Ehh…maybe you should send me some lyrics or something.” [Laughs.] He wound up being fine with it of course, and we had a great session, and man, what an honor, I mean, such a legendary guy, and we had a blast in the studio.  

“Why Does This Always Happen to Me?” (from 2003’s Poodle Hat) 

AY: Right, which was supposed to sort of be my Ben Folds sound-alike. Ben and I are old friends at this point, and of course I sought his keyboard work for that song. So he came in and knocked it out. I think that’s an F-Sharp, so he was kind of mad at me for that. [Laughs.] Not a very keyboard-friendly key. But yeah, that was a lot of fun to record as well. Again, not a real laugh-out-loud kind of song. Another very, very dark song, and that came from the place of every now and then I would have these moments—I like to think I’m a pretty nice guy, but I have these moments where I, in my own head at least, I show an astounding lack of empathy. 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?” And there’ll be a horrible car accident, and all you can think of is how you’re going to be late to work, and these are real moments where I find myself being horrified by my own brain, having so little empathy for other people.

AVC: So you take the ugliness within your own soul, and you make it funny?

AY: Yeah, and then I kind of amp it up, and every verse is worse than the last, and by the end the guy’s just a full-on monster. But you know—I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before—I wrote this song before 9/11 just because I felt a lot of that selfishness in our culture, and immediately after 9/11 it felt like our national attitude had changed, and everyone was pitching in and being helpful, and being supporting and loving, which lasted about a week. [Laughs.] But at that point I thought my song was obsolete. I thought, “Well, this is not the way people are behaving anymore. We’ve become this loving utopia.” Well, like I said, that didn’t last a very long period of time, and now we’re back to our own selfish ways again.

“Frank’s 2000 Inch TV” (from 1993’s Alapalooza)

AY: That’s my R.E.M. sound-alike, and that’s my paean to consumerism and envy. Having the latest, greatest thing. Just a consumer electronics anthem. It’s been pointed out to me that there have been some TVs, maybe not made specifically for home use, but certainly monitors that have exceeded the 2,000 inches in the song, so it may not be quite so absurd as it was when I first recorded it the early ’90s.

AVC: There’s obviously some satire of consumerism, but also a certain fondness, it seems. 

AY: It’s a definite love/hate thing. You know, I’m obviously making fun of the fact that it’s ridiculous to want a 2,000-inch TV, but part of me is going, “That would really be cool!” [Laughs.]

“Albuquerque” (from 1999’s Running With Scissors)

AY: Oh, we played it every night on our last tour; that was our big encore. But I don’t want to get into the habit of playing that all the time because, you know, it wears me out. That’s kind of a draining song. That was one of those songs where I thought it wasn’t going to be a big fan-favorite. I specifically put it on the end of the album because I thought that I’m going to make this song so long that people are only gonna want to hear it once. It would be like an odyssey that they go through once, and they go, “Ah, I survived. I made it all the way to the end,” but it wound up being one of my more popular songs, and people listened to it over and over, they memorized the words. People have gotten actually kind of obsessive about it, which is the reason we put it into the set list on the last tour. This song is meant to be sort of in the style of The Rugburns and Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood and any other kind of hard-driving rock narrative. And you know, I made it a little more ridiculous than the normal kind of rock narrative, but nonetheless, it’s in that vein.

AVC: When you write a song like that, where it’s narrative, but also digressive and free-flowing, what’s the songwriting process like? Are there a lot of drafts?  

AY: That’s more of a free-flowing song than most other songs, because for a song like that there are specifically no parameters. 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. But that was kind of a fun one to write just because I didn’t feel a lot of pressure. I just thought, “Okay, I’m gonna write a song that’s just going to annoy people for 12 minutes.” [Laughs.]

AVC: Do you feel like you succeeded?

AY: Well, even better, a lot of people actually liked it, but I would hope that at least a few people were annoyed. 

AVC: Your music is conducive to a certain kind of obsessive sensibility. When you write, do you play to that at all? 

AY: Yeah, which is kind of one of the reasons it takes me longer and longer between albums these days, because I’m continually more cognizant of it, for myself as well. I know now that everything I write, I’m going to put out, and I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life. So there’s a little bit of a legacy thing there as well. When I did something like “Another One Rides The Bus,” I would crank out the lyrics in half an hour, and play it on the air the next night, and not think twice about it. Now I realize that everything I do has some sort of lasting value, and a lot of people actually care about the specific thing that I do. And so I put as much effort into it as my wife will allow.