“Am I the first person to feel strange calling you ‘weird’?” John Mayer — bespectacled, grinning goofily, very much nerding out — is sitting across from “Weird Al” Yankovic, interviewing the Hawaiian shirt-clad parody music king, who is sitting across from him for his SiriusXM show, How’s Life With John Mayer.
“You can call me Al, like Paul Simon says,” Yankovic says with smile, before adding that the most normal thing about him is, probably, his pancreas.
It’s a funny quip, but also an understatement. Let’s just get this out of the way: “Weird Al” Yankovic is, beneath his accordion-playing, polka-loving surface, exceedingly normal. He likes long evening walks to get his steps in. He enjoys seeing movies and trying out new restaurants with his wife and daughter, who just graduated college. He grumbles good-naturedly about the ongoing renovation of his home in the Hollywood Hills. (“It’s going to look almost exactly the same as it did before, except it cost a fortune!”) The 65-year-old artist’s one attempt at rock star behavior, back in his early-’80s heyday, was comically un-vain: On a touring rider, he requested, in the spirit of Van Halen’s famed ban on brown M&M’S, “one really horrible Hawaiian shirt for every show I did.” (On that run, he did 200, and a collection that now extends to a storage unit somewhere in greater L.A. began.)
Still, if not precisely weird, Yankovic is truly singular. His catalog can be divided into two types of songs: intricately crafted, meticulously arranged, hilarious yet never mean-spirited parodies of hits by acts ranging from Michael Jackson to Coolio to Nirvana to Lady Gaga, and original pastiches, for which he deep dives into artists’ catalogs to create songs that, with eerie accuracy, mimic the sounds and idiosyncrasies of those genre-spanning artists.
Read Billboard’s full “Weird Al” Yankovic cover story here.
