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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Dan Le Batard Show · South Beach Sessions - Weird Al Yankovic · 15 May 2025 podcast

So I was still working for minimum wage, you know, at a mail room for a radio syndication company. And I remember I went to the mail post office box one day and picked up the mail, and the billboard magazine was sticking out of the mail bag. And I opened it up, and I'm there on the Hot 100 chart. And I thought, oh, I should probably give notice.

I should probably get serious about this weird old thing.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think a lot of it was literally going door-to-door. I might have done that when I was –

uh much younger and naive but it was a lot of you know sending cassette tapes in the mail to to you know various record companies and getting you know blank letters of rejection um and then um uh my manager Jay Levy he he was Dr. Demento's manager back in the in the early 80s and he saw me perform with Dr. Demento on stage and thought oh this kid might have some potential.

So he decided to work with me and he kind of got my name around town. And we got, again, turned down by virtually everybody. But Scotty Brothers at the time wanted to give it a shot because I think the president of the record company used to play the accordion when he was a kid. And so he had a soft spot for accordion players. So he said, I'll give the Yankee Kid a shot.

Well, it wound up being 14 albums, actually, because at some point in the middle of the contract, I was becoming so popular that we were able to renegotiate the contract for better terms. But part of the renegotiation was, well, okay, we'll give you better terms, but you've got to give us two more albums.

And then we renegotiated again a little later for even better terms, but then two more albums. So it wound up being a 14-album deal, which took me just 32 years to fulfill. But we fulfilled it. So Mandatory Fun, which came out 10 years ago, was, I guess, 12. 11 years ago. That was my last album and ostensibly will be my last album. But yeah, it's it's just and they wanted to resign me, obviously.

I mean, it wasn't at that point. Scotty Brothers had sold my contract to another

company but and they wanted to resign me but i just like the idea of not being beholden to anybody not owing anybody anything when i was under contract i always felt like three more albums to go you know i just you know my house is paid off i don't you know i don't pay everything that i have i own i just don't like the idea of of somebody waiting for me to do something

It's pretty peaceful. I mean, I'm at a point in my life where I don't have as much of a fire in my belly as I had in my 20s. I don't, you know, I'm okay not working and just waiting until I get inspired to do something. I certainly haven't, you know, people, I haven't retired. I still am making music. I'm being more involved in TV shows and movies.

I got to put out my We're the Allianz of Exturia a couple years ago. So, you know, I've still been very busy and

it it's just that you know uh it's it's kind of on my own terms uh i i i don't feel like i i need to continue creating like it in the 80s like in the 80s i was like i can't believe we got a record deal and and i felt like i had to put an album every album every single year because otherwise it would all go away like you got to grab that brass ring every time it comes around

And it took me a while before I realized that, you know, I've had some hit albums, some albums that didn't do so well, but I was doing well enough that people still wanted to hear from me and I had an actual career. And once I realized I could calm down a little bit, I was just kind of putting out things whenever I felt like it and my fan base grew. you know, basically stayed with me.

So that's a nice place to be.

Yeah, it's a small, it was a, you know, gradual process. I think it maybe started sometime in the mid-90s, which you probably can see because the span between albums got longer and longer.

Uh, and, and, and in a big way, you know, since my last album, I kind of feel like, you know, uh, I I'll continue to be creative, but, but, um, I'm just not going to have to like come up with 12 songs and put them all out at once. I can just do songs whenever they occur to me.

architecture yeah that was that came about um when i was 12 years old um i i was uh had a meeting with my my high school guidance counselor um uh and and uh i told him he said what do you want to do for a living and i said well you know i i'd really like to uh be a contributor to mad magazine i'd like to write and illustrate for mad magazine and he kind of looked at me and said

Yeah, no, that's not really a job for a grown-up. You want to have a real job, you know. Because I think, I don't know what it's like now, but certainly back in the 70s, I don't think anybody would encourage you to go into show business or go into the arts.

But I mean, you know, it just seemed like an unreasonable thing for a kid to want to be when he grew up. And he said, well, look, you like design. You're good in math. You love this drafting class you just had. You should be an architect. And I kind of said, well, if you think so, OK. So it seemed like it was like the adult choice.

It was something that it made sense for me to do to, you know, grow up and be an architect.

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