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‘Weird Al’ Yankovic: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot
'Weird Al' Yankovic Photos: Pics from the Billboard cover shoot as Weird Al preps for his Bigger and Weirder summer tour.
“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 Maye r. (“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. 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.
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