Weird Al Yankovic
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 22 May
Weird Al Yankovic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, and it's not an easy major. I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and they have a great architecture school. But, I mean, they called it, the students called it architorture because, I mean, they worked us hard. You know, we'd be up in those labs literally all night long, you know, but before a big project was due, we probably, you know, we didn't sleep. You know, it was a lot of work.
And I'm no stranger to hard work, but to be that involved in something that I didn't really have a passion for, it was tough on me. Because other people in my class, they lived and breathed it, and they loved the form following the function, and it was just something that meant a lot to them. And it didn't mean a lot to me.
I mean, I had more fun every Saturday night doing the Weird Al show on my campus radio show. I looked forward to that. That's what I lived for. And the rest of the week in the architecture lab, that was just like, just get me to Saturday night.
You know, I don't know. I was always good in school. I worked really hard at my studies. That meant a lot to me. I was the valedictorian in my high school, straight A's all the way through. And, you know, I think my parents appreciated that, but it was a personal point of pride. I just, you know, I knew I was good at it and I kind of wanted to be the best at it.
So I did whatever I could to make that happen.
I certainly have to work for it. I don't know. I mean, I think it's a universal desire to want to please your parents and make them proud of you. And I'm sure that was a big part of it. And also, it was me trying to be the best version of me that I could and express that through being a good student.
Yeah. I mean, if they wrote the song, if they didn't write the song, we don't always approach the artist, but that's usually the case.
When I first started out, I mean, literally, I was just, you know, a kid sending songs to Dr. Demento as a teenager. You know, I didn't think, oh, I should call up Queen and see what they think of this parody. And in fact, that got us into a little bit of trouble because, you know, after Another One Rides the Bus became a big hit on the Dr. Demento show, we got a call from Queen's lawyer saying...
You know, you probably should have asked us about this or run this by us. And thankfully, they had a good enough sense of humor that they didn't sue me or anything like that. They just, you know, finished up the paperwork and said, OK, now it's legal. So it was a little shaky in the beginning because I just didn't know how to do it.
And then by the time I was doing my second album, I wanted to do Eat It. But I thought, you know, Michael Jackson is the biggest artist in the universe and there's no way he's going to. you know, agreed to co-writing a song with this, you know, idiot kid. But word got to him and he approved it. And so now there's a contract with my signature next to his saying that we are the co-writers of Eat It.
Well, it was, yeah. I mean, especially because that was early on, and that really turned the key, because after Michael Jackson gave his permission, then it was a lot easier to get permission from everybody else. It was ammunition, you know? It was like, well, Michael Jackson was okay with it, so what's your problem?
What they don't know? Um... You know, people just think, you know, a lot of people have the misconception that just because it's funny music, that it's effortless, that like, oh, my six-year-old kid changes the words to songs. I'm like, well, I don't disbelieve you, but I can't imagine it's very good, you know. And it requires, to do it well, it requires a lot of effort.
That's probably what, you know, a lot of people don't realize. Like, if you go through my notebooks, Well, like another one, Rides the Bus, I probably wrote that in like less than half an hour because I just thought, oh, here's this silly song I'm going to put on the Dr. Domeno show.
But after I started realizing that people actually cared about what I did, about my art, and that I would have to maybe play some of these songs on stage for decades to come, I started spending a lot more time on it. If you look at some of my notebooks, for every line in a song, I've got a dozen variations.
Like either it's a different joke or it's a slightly different way to phrase a line or the accents on a different syllable, something like that. But it's something that I really take pains to perfect. Even though it seems like it's just this ridiculous song, there's a lot of effort that goes into it. Even the most ridiculous song is... you know, probably spend a week or two just fine-tuning it.
More having done it, yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say that there's no pleasure in writing. Certainly there's especially moments where I come up with an idea or a rhyme that works really well and I...
have a small moment of pride but uh the writing process is is in general not that fun uh my wife will describe when i'm in a writing process and i just wander through the house like a zombie with a thousand yard stare you know just because i'm so in my own head trying to think of things But I feel a tremendous amount of accomplishment having written something. So that's definitely the best part.
The idea of like, oh, I have a body of work now and I did that. A former version of me is responsible for that.
I think so. I'm a pretty good editor of my own ideas. There are some songwriters that will write 10 songs before they have breakfast in the morning. They'll write 100 songs and record 40 of them and 12 will wind up on the album. I've never done that.
I maybe come up with 100 ideas, but I'm pretty good at looking at those ideas and saying, well, I think this would merit a three and a half minute pop song. I see what the hook is. I see where the jokes would be. I think there's enough here that I can make that into a good song. So I'll come up with 12 ideas. I will write those 12 songs and I'll record those 12 songs and I'm done.
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