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
There's no like hidden Weird Al songs in the vault that we just had left over. Like everything I've ever done is out there.
Well, everything I did in the very beginning, certainly Another One Rides the Bus and probably My Bologna as well. I mean, that was just, you know, a dumb song about lunch meat basically that I came up with because My Sharona happened to be the song of the summer. So I recorded that in the bathroom across the hall from my campus radio station. And I can't imagine I spent a lot of time.
time on that and it probably shows i i like those songs because they're historical they're a part of my story but i wouldn't hold them up and say these are great pieces of art or something that i really struggled with they were just like some some goofy songs that i wrote when i was very young
My Bologna was the first – Forgive me. It was the first one that – yeah, it was a big hit on the Demento show. It wasn't the first thing of mine he played. But like in the early days, I would send him tapes in the mail and he'd play them on the radio. And I would call up the request line and try to disguise my voice and request my own songs. Yeah. and have people from my high school do the same.
But My Bologna was the first time when it was a big hit without any input from me. All of a sudden, people from all over the world were requesting My Bologna, and I thought, wow, this is unusual. Other people like my stuff.
Yeah, I started when I was about seven, yeah.
Well, I didn't take it to parties or anything like that. Maybe I would play it in the school talent show. But it wasn't something I mean, I joke about that being the life of the party, but I didn't really force it on people. Sometimes if people came over and they wanted to hear me play, I would play for them. But it wasn't something that I forced on people too often.
I took my comfort in comedy and music. I mean, you know, I was inspired by Monty Python and SCTV and musically all the songs I was hearing on the Dr. Demento show and on rock radio. And those two things were always my passions. And I just always feel so blessed because somehow I was able to turn those two passions and make a living out of it.
So, you know, my dad used to say that the only real sign of success is being able to make a living doing the thing you love. So if, you know, if I didn't, you know, have a 40 year career, I still feel like a success because I've just been, you know, able to make a living doing specifically the things I love. So that's I always am so thankful for that.
How would it have been different if you'd been Al the architect? Extremely different. And that came close to happening. You know, there was a couple years there after college where I kind of didn't know how my life was going to go. And I guess in retrospect, it was a pretty scary time because, you know, my whole future was ahead of me.
But yeah, there's definitely an alternate route where I would have been just like Al the architect and probably have been somewhat miserable my whole life. I mean, the guy that is my stage manager on tour and has been for many years, he's an architect. And he still works every now and then. He'll go on the road with me for several months, then go back to his firm.
And it just reminds me, like, you know, okay, here's a guy that is doing quite well, and even he needs to get out on the road.
You know, I'm generally a very happy person. I really can't complain. I can't complain. We live in a world that's full of a lot of not so nice things. But I try not to be overwhelmed by that. I try not to focus or be hypersensitive about the things that I personally can't fix. I try to make the world a better place in my own small way.
And I keep my sanity by just trying to focus on the small pieces of joy that I can find in life.
You know, every time I do a tour, it kind of exposes my act to a new generation. When you look out into the audience, it's really multi-generational because it's the people that have been there since the 80s and now they're bringing their kids and sometimes their grandkids. So it's just the fact that, you know, I've shown tenacity.
I'm still doing it and I'm bringing something different every time I go out. which I guess that's appealing to people, that it's nice to be able to just put myself in front of people. I hear all the time about parents that have kids that came up to them and said, you know, I just heard about this Weird Al guy. You ever hear of him? And they're like, yeah, we've heard of him.
You know, I was just young and naive, and I probably didn't even know at that time that I should be scared. Only with the decades of time to have retrospection do I look back and say, wow, I should have been scared. That was a pretty scary moment in my life. But at the time, you're just too young to know any better?
Kind of, yeah, because I didn't know really what my future held for me, and I was just looking at my options. I mean, I remember I graduated from college with a degree, but I didn't want to be an architect. I wanted to get as far away from that as I could, and I applied for anywhere that would take me. I think I applied to a phone company.
I think I applied for janitorial work, and they wouldn't take me because, like, you get a college degree. What do you want to do this for? And I had to explain that I needed to eat food on occasion. And I got very lucky because the job that I got out of college was working for a radio syndication, a company called Westwood One. And they syndicated the Dr. Demento show.
So not only did I get to hang out with Dr. Demento when he did his weekly broadcast, but all these... rock stars were coming into the studio to be interviewed. So I got to meet Frank Zappa. I got him to autograph my copy of Freak Out. I got to meet all these cool people. And even though I was working in the mailroom, literally for like $5 an hour at the time, which I guess was minimum wage,
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