Al sits in front of bay windows and a bookshelf topped with Grammys (Al has five of them).
Obviously, he is in a Hawaiian shirt, nothing too flashy—dark and simple with large white florals and leaves.
Long curly hair, a light stubbly goatee, now showing gray, no glasses–he famously underwent laser eye surgery live on KTLA5 News in 1998 to prove how easy the procedure is. At the time, UCLA Health Center was one of only five facilities in the nation to offer Lasik. The newscast is still available to watch on Weird Al Yankovic’s YouTube channel. It’s remarkable to see that Al looks the same today as in the video–albeit the beard—where he’s wearing a dark Hawaiian shirt with colorful hot rods and classic cars, a bit gaudy through the modern lens.
He’s been fat. Amish. A surgeon. White and nerdy (he may actually still be both of those).
If you’re basing your understanding of Al’s past from his 2022 “biopic,” you may be disappointed to learn of the fictitious liberties the film makes when addressing a fiery romance with Madonna. Or that he didn’t actually play a part in dismantling Pablo Escobar and cartel kingpins in Central America. Or that the turbulence actor Daniel Radcliffe portrays, battling drugs, sex and pastiche rock bottoms, while sporting a “Weird Al” Halloween costume, is more than a bit exaggerated.
The record deals, influence and mentorship by Dr. Demento, importance of family and faith were all genuine and couldn’t help but come across, even in the exaggerated parody of a rock star biopic.
Amazingly, the door-to-door accordion salesman did actually show up one day in Al’s youth, pushing the music boxes like a Cutco knife set. Frankie Yankovic—America's Polka King who reigned supreme in the ‘40s—has no relation to Al, except as an inspiration and few-times collaborator.
Just in July, Al released “Polkamania!” featuring straight polka covers of songs by: Billie Eilish, Adele, Miley, Taylor, and of course Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B for a boot-stomping “WAP.”
“Polka medleys are something that I've been doing for a very long time. Even before I had a record deal, I was doing them live just right out of college,” Al says. Al studied architecture at the California Polytechnic Institute.
“The first polka medley that actually got recorded and released was ‘Polkas on 45,’ which appeared on my second album. But out of these 14 studio albums that I've done, I believe there are polka medleys on 12 of them. And beyond that, I did a few other polkas, including one in 2018 called, ‘The Hamilton Polka.’ Lin-Manuel Miranda personally asked me to do a polka mashup of songs from the musical.
“But I hadn't done a polka medley that was a pop culture time capsule since my last album, Mandatory Fun, and I was looking at the calendar and realizing, ‘Oh the 10 year anniversary of Mandatory Fun is coming up pretty soon, and also I'm gonna be on the road soon and it would be nice to have some new material.’ All the planets were aligning and it became a perfect storm. It just seemed to make sense.
“So I went through the Billboard charts. That's a huge period of time to be looking at, so I limited myself to songs that had made No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. And beyond that, I just kind of narrowed it down to songs from artists that I thought made a huge impact, and as long as it had a very strong and identifiable musical, lyrical hook, and was ultimately something that I thought just sounded really fun and funny as a polka. So I got that list down to a manageable size and then I made my final selections.”
“The way it works from there is I basically give that list to my manager Jay Levey, who I've been working with since the early ‘80s, and he works his magic. In the past he generally hasn't gone to the publisher, which I guess might be the more conventional way of doing it, but because I've been in the business for so long and I've got so many relationships with artists, he finds it easier to personally go to either the artists or their representation and get their blessing, because if the artists OK it, the publishers are not going to say no, right?
“I'm a huge music fan. I'm not jaded at all by it. To get an email from Billie Eilish or Miley Cyrus saying that they're thrilled that they were in my polka medley—I mean that kind of blows my mind. I'm extremely honored by that.”
Bigger and Weirder Tour in 2025
With a new polka medley and a title that will deliver, Al is seeming calm, excited and in control when it comes to his newly announced Bigger and Weirder Tour. Al lights up when given the opportunity to speak logistics. Mainly about the details of what makes the new tour his biggest yet, which include the massive venues and increase in tour personnel.
“Since I'm not releasing new albums every tour cycle, I try to think of different ways to make the tours different and exciting, and part of the hook of Bigger and Weirder is the band is, in fact, bigger! It's literally twice as big as it always has been.
“In the past, I've got my four main guys, who I've been with for several decades, and for this particular tour, we're adding four more people to add to the size and the sound, which also enables us to do a number of things we were just not able to do as a five-piece. So now not only are we back to doing all the costume changes and the props, and doing the parodies and everything you've come to expect from one of our big shows, we're also doing a few songs that we've never done live before just because we wouldn't have been able to do those songs without using an inordinate amount of backing tracks, which we try not to do.”
This comes just a few years after The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, featuring original songs, and, upfront about its asterisked description, which boasted “non-parodies.”
“I'm at a fortunate time of my life because I can do whatever I want to do,” he laughs. “I just do what I feel like doing, and, you know, I really like the idea of doing the ‘Vanity Tours.’”
For only a few tour cycles throughout his career, Al and his band have played genuine songs—sans parodies, sans costumes.
“That's something that I certainly would not have been able to get away with early in my career, but, you know, for my own sanity, and for the sake of the band who's been doing iterations of the same show for a long time, it felt nice to be able to just walk on stage, sit down on the stools and play music like an actual band. And also do a lot of things that we normally wouldn't play because you have a finite amount of time when you're on stage doing a concert, and you can't play a lot of the deep cuts, so we wanted to do one tour that was just us focusing on those songs that you normally won't hear. But, now that the fans have been assuaged, and the band and I got that out of our systems, we're coming back with a show that's bigger and more complex than a lot of our earlier concert tours.”
“I can tell you who the new band members are. They're all multi-instrumentalists because that was one of the criteria—we wanted them to be able to do different things during the course of the show. Like you can't just play the guitar, you have to also play tenor sax and be able to sing and do a stupid dance.
“So on this tour, along with my longtime band: Jon ‘Bermuda’ Schwartz, Steve Jay, Jim West and Rubén Valtierra, we're adding four new people, one of whom we've worked with before a number of times, Monique Donnelly. She was one of our female background singers. She's been working with me on the road and in the studio for many many years and she's coming back; also Scheila Gonzalez, who toured with Dweezil Zappa’s Zappa plays Zappa and also Men At Work; Probyn Gregory, who played with The Beach Boys for a very long time; a wonderful multi-instrumentalist and the youngest member—she's in her early 20s—Payton Rose Velligan. My road manager handpicked her because she's on the road with Foreigner as a tour manager, and Payton's own band opened for Foreigner. They're all of course super talented and I just love being able to expand the band this way and I look forward to all the possibilities.
“I should point out it kind of blows my mind the places we're playing on this tour,” Al says. “Seventy shows in three months, that's not unusual. What’s unusual is we're playing Madison Square Garden. We're playing the L.A. Forum. We're playing these places that I used to say we were playing as a joke back in the day. And now we're actually playing them! And people will come! It's going to be one for the record books.”
AL's Advice
Al has charted a course in the music industry that has never been done before, and likely can never be done again—to the scale of Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift—a comparison that is no joke.
His staying power is an anomaly, perhaps attributed to being well-intentioned since his early days. His body of work translates well when rediscovered and reintroduced decade after decade to new generations, especially with the consistent tides of technology.
“My advice is the same as it's been for the last few decades,” Al says. “The way to get your foot in the door these days is certainly online. Make your presence known on social media. YouTube certainly has created a number of huge stars and has been very lucrative for a lot of people. It's taken away all the gatekeepers used when I first started out.
“I was very fortunate, but I mean, back in the day, there were a bunch of people in a tower somewhere in New York City who decided if they were going to give you a shot or not. ‘I like this person and I'm gonna give them airtime,’ or ‘I'm going to put them in heavy rotation,’ or whatever it is—it was a small group of people that basically decided your fate. And now your fate is in your own hands. You can put your stuff out there and if it's good, chances are people will see it and like it and you'll get your clicks. You'll get your views and hopefully get your popularity, and from there, it depends how you want to build on it—with live shows, with streaming… There are so many options available to people now. It's almost overwhelming how many inroads there are to the business, which is not to say that it's easy—it's certainly not any easier than it was, but you just don't have those gatekeepers anymore.”
“I consider my peers people like The Lonely Island and Tenacious D and Flight of the Conchords, who have done amazing work for decades now. Just a few minutes before this interview, I watched the new Randy Rainbow video on YouTube and he's been cranking out some extremely clever things, doing quite well, and he's touring now and I have to assume making a living just from YouTube at this point.
“There are a lot of people doing comedy and doing well at it, and that's something probably that wasn't the case in the ‘80s because record labels weren't really looking so much for comedy acts or novelty acts or anything like that. It was why, again, I say I was lucky, but it was very difficult for me to get signed in the early ‘80s because everybody thought, ‘Oh comedy music... You're a one hit wonder, you'll have, maybe if you're lucky, a fluke hit single and then you'll be in the dustbins of musical history.’ So with an online presence, I think not only is humor not looked down on, but it's encouraged. I think that people want people like that, and if you do that kind of material, I think you actually have a better shot now than you would have had a few decades ago.
“Obviously The Lonely Island got their stuff exposed on Saturday Night Live, so that's a huge deal. Tenacious D had their HBO show, as well as Flight of the Conchords. So I mean all that definitely helps, but you can't discount the online presence. That's what's really helped establish acts, but also has broken a lot of new and up-and-coming acts.
“Usually when I'm online promoting myself, it's to promote something that's new, but every now and then, there will be a flashback like, ‘Hey remember this?’ of something that I did a long time ago, which sends someone down a rabbit hole, and then they wind up spending the afternoon watching old viral videos.
“It still cracks me up when I hear about fans that hear a song that my parody is based on, like 10 years after hearing my parody. They'll be in a supermarket and go, ‘This sounds familiar. These lyrics aren't funny, what's going on here?’”
WEIRD Film, Sincere Al
This leads to WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story, Al's biopic which he was heavily involved in and starred in (as one of those gatekeepers at the Big Record Company).
Channeling the great rock 'n' roll films of history: Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Buddy Holly Story, Rocketman, Walk the Line; and with the ridiculousness of Tenacious D & The Pick of Destiny and Spinal Tap, WEIRD lacks in accuracy what the other great rock films overcompensate in drama.
When asked if other artists (and everyone in general) should be taking themselves a little less seriously, Al ironically got serious.
“I'm not going to dictate what anybody else should do. People can make up their own minds about that.
“For myself, I couldn't fathom any other way I'd want my [film] story to be told. I didn't want to be serious about it in the slightest, and I thought if there was gonna be a biopic, you would have to go completely off the rails. So that's what Eric Appel and I did. Eric of course directed and co-wrote with me—the idea being that we wanted to kind of pull people in, maybe thinking the first third of the movie had some basis in reality. There are a few things we pulled from my actual life—it was reality-adjacent. About halfway through, though, even the most gullible people are going, ‘Oh yeah, this is a joke, right?’ All of this keeps going down, and when we're all in on the joke, then it becomes truly funny and none of it is offensive.
“I suppose a true satirist would say nothing is beyond parody or satire, but I do have my line. Instead of trying to cross it, I really honestly don't want to offend people. I think it's possible to be funny and humorous without getting people upset at you or horrified. And, you know, I suppose that I'm a sincere person, but it's hard for me to write song lyrics that are unironic or unhumorous. I mean I've been asked to do that.
“I've told this story before about John Gourley from Portugal. The Man. We're old friends at this point, and he wanted to write a song together with me and I tried to write some vulnerable, from-the-heart lyrics, and my brain was just not wired that way. I couldn't do it. It was tough. It ends up having a punchline. I can't escape it.”
“Weird”
Al is of course aware that the term “weird” has now come back into fashion.
“It's being used in a pejorative sense, and I have to confess, when I first heard it that way in the [political] campaigns, I had sort of a knee-jerk reaction to it, because, you know, obviously it's part of my professional name, and I've spent my entire adult life trying to empower weird—it's OK to be weird,” Al says.
“A lot of kids that were outcasts or rejects or considered freaks in school would look up to me as a guy that was weird and did OK, so part of me was really taken aback by that and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way, but then I took a few steps back and took a deep breath and I realized, OK, well, I think people are intelligent enough to know that there's good weird and there's bad weird. There's like, you know, the creative, quirky, whimsical kind of weird, and there's the clown looking at you from behind a tree in a forest weird. I think people know that I'm the former.
“Unfortunately the weirdos who are insulted are maybe a little less in on the joke, and they're maybe not able to take themselves less seriously. Here's a good way to tell: the people that are bad weird are always really insulted when you call them weird.”
Visit weirdal.com for tour dates
