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
And I thought, oh, Alfred sounds like, you know, like Alfred E. Newman. It sounds like the butler on Batman. It sounds like, you know, Poindexter. It sounded geeky. I thought, Al. Al sounds cool. That's a good, masculine, firm name. I'll be Al.
Yeah, and then within a year, I was Weird Al.
Well, when my manager first told me that over the phone, I thought he was joking. Because in the early 80s, we had tour T-shirts with fake, bogus dates on the back. And like, oh, I'll be doing a residency at Madison Square Garden. It was one of those things we joked about. And now it's actually happening for real. So it's a bit mind-blowing. It's...
Hopefully I won't be in the fetal position on the floor, but I did have a small bit of anxiety the second he told me, like, oh, that's a big show. I've got to go do this now.
And last time I was in New York, I went to Madison Square Garden, and I walked around the perimeter of it, and there's all these posters of Elton John and Eddie Vedder and all these quotes from people, Bruce Springsteen saying, you're nothing until you play at Madison Square Garden. I'm like, oh, don't make me more nervous, okay?
Probably the Forum, the same tour in LA.
I think we're the only three acts to have our own top 40 singles in the last four decades.
It is pretty crazy, I have to admit. I mean, part of me feels like this whole thing is like everybody's playing a joke. I mean, like
like yeah like it's sort of like you know who is the um uh the make-a-wish kid that the bat kid like well we'll just pretend that he's superman you know and we'll just let out think he's a rock star you know i mean five so you've won five grammys right yes and and 17 nominations that sounds right um not that we're counting uh that
It was crazy. I mean, I was up against, gosh, I think I was up against Richard Pryor and Rodney Dangerfield and all these icons, and somehow I won. And every single Grammy is as wonderful of an experience. It never gets old. I never get jaded from those kind of honors because it's, you know, It's my peers showing their appreciation for what I do. So that's still mind blowing to me.
Well, because I was encouraged to stay at home pretty much all the time, my dad would try to think of ways that I could be amused. So at one point, it was a small house in Linwood, California, and they had a basement, which I don't know was like a... holdover from the Cold War. I don't know why we had a basement, but we did.
And at one point my dad knocked down the walls in the basement and he let me make tunnels under the house. So they called it the mole hole. And we'd just bring buckets and buckets of dirt out and I would make my own like little, you know, like ant farm kind of trails underneath the house. He said, as long as you don't dig underneath the foundation, have fun. Right. Right.
And it was such an odd thing, but my friends would come over and we'd like spend like the day under the house digging tunnels.
I never collapsed the house, but they knew where I was at least.
I remember my mom telling me once that when I was a young kid on the playground, she saw a woman approaching me, and she said that she had a vision that this woman was growing devil horns and that she was going to— do some harm to me. So she ran and picked me up and took me home immediately. So that had to be a manifestation of some kind of paranoia or fear.
I mean, she was very concerned with people, you know, harming me in some way. So she basically, my entire childhood was her doing her best to protect me. And it was all well-meaning and again, came from a place of pure love. But as a child and especially as a teenager, it felt very restrictive. And it was, you know, I kind of had a lot of bitterness about it. In fact,
I remember when I was going into my senior year in high school, and I was like 15 years old, and she wouldn't let me go visit a friend's house or whatever. I asked her to do something that seemed quite harmless, and she said no. And here was my big clap back. I said, oh, it's okay. Next year I'll be in college, and I can do anything I want. And you can see the wheels turning on her head.
It's like, oh, okay. Oh, no. I better transition him a little bit into this.
Was there a lot of... It was a religious upbringing, yeah. Like, we were a church-going family, and yeah, that was part of it.
you know break free you said you weren't rebellious but you break free into is it going to college so that i'm going to be something closer to my own man yeah yeah so that my my senior year they they loosen the reins a little bit just because i realized you know we better like not let him like rebel in college we'll just kind of like gradually give him his freedom but i remember um
Showing 241–260 of 271 · page 13 of 14
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