w e i r d a l ya n kov i c
Weird Al: Doing What he Loves Not many artists can be respected for their forays into the film, music and literature worlds. Unless of course, you are the satirical demigod genius Weird Al Yankovic. Matt Petherbridge had the chance to quiz Yankovic about all aspects of his creative brain, including his new children’s book, When I Grow Up. You’ve just released one of your dream projects, a children’s book called When I Grow Up, which has reached #4 on the New York Times bestsellers list. What is the story about? It’s about an eight-year-old kid named Billy, who is up for show-and-tell in his class and amuses all of his friends, telling them about the crazy, wild, imaginative things he wants to be when he grows up. It’s a rhyming picture book, it’s funny but it’s also very sweet and it has that underlying message that there is a world of possibility out there. What inspired you to write the book? My dad always used to say that the true definition of success is being able to do what you love to do for a living. I graduated from college with a degree in architecture, because I thought that was the responsible choice given my aptitude. But I was never all that happy in college and it was nice to know after I graduated I could change my mind. Has your daughter had a chance to read the book yet?
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She was the first person in the world to read it and by the time the book came out, she had it memorised. Now she reads it to me for my bedtime stories (laughs). I want to encourage my daughter to follow her dreams. The message of the book is that you don’t have to limit yourself to anything. The world has anxiously been waiting on your new album since the release of the Internet Leaks EP in 2009 (which will be included as part of the album). When will it be released? All the artwork is done, I’ve got 11 songs produced and mastered and it’s really just waiting for me to come up with a hit single (laughs). I can’t really give any kind of release date though. I’d prefer to keep it a secret, because with comedy, the less you know about it, the more impact it can have. Has the rapid nature of digital downloading changed your approach to creating and releasing new music? It’s a metamorphosis. Internet Leaks was a nice experiment because I’ve never before
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released anything digital only. It allowed me to be more topical than I had in the past and certainly that’s an option I have in the future. I think the industry is starting to tip towards being singles-driven, like it was back in the 50s and 60s. If it does, then it opens me up to being more topical and timely and maybe that will be a more viable option for me to start releasing songs as soon as I come up with them.
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What inspires your creative process when writing one of your trademark parodies? A lot of times it’s nothing more complicated than taking a hook from a popular current song and doing a pun on the title or the hook (‘White and Nerdy’) or doing a variation on the theme (‘Smells Like Nirvana’). Sometimes it’s reverse engineered though. I’ll have in mind a topic I want to talk about and then I’ll find a song that works well with that. I wanted to write a song about the upcoming Star Wars movie at the time (Episode 1: The Phantom Menace) and I used Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ to make ‘The Saga Begins’. Sometimes I will do a song that would be the antithesis of the original song. I thought ‘Amish Paradise’ would be about as far away from Coolio’s ‘Gangsters Paradise’ as you could get. It basically boils down to doing something that I think is funny and hopefully people will share that opinion. Weird Al Yankovic is to perform at the Civic Theatre in Newcastle on Thursday, March 17.
reverb magazine issue #056 — March 2011 37