Billboard cover star “Weird Al” Yankovic takes us through a day in his life and shares how his versatility has allowed him to perform on iconic stages like Coachella and beyond. The legendary parody artist opens up about his chart-topping hits on the Billboard Hot 100, teases an exciting Broadway musical in development, discusses how he prepares for tours, his collaboration with Dave Way on his polkas, the creative process behind his parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” why he’s stepped back from creating parodies and more.
“Weird Al” Yankovic:
Hey, Billboard, how are you doing? I’m “Weird Al” Yankovic, and you’ll be spending the entire day with me, but first, let’s have lunch at Crossroads Kitchen.
Rebecca Milzoff:
We’re at Crossroads in LA. This is a place you’ve been coming to for a long time, right?
Yeah. I mean, this is my favorite upscale vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles. And I just remember when Impossible burgers weren’t a thing. There were only three restaurants in all of America that had Impossible burgers, and this was one of them. And I was very, very excited to have an Impossible burger here. And literally, within six months, they’re selling them at White Castle.
Well, it’s funny to be sitting at a vegan restaurant with the king of singing about junk food. It’s interesting that food has been such a continuous theme in your canon, as it were. Is that something that, along the way of songwriting, you realized it was just fruitful material and it always proved to be funny? Or why did you keep coming back to it as a theme?
It’s just something that doesn’t get covered in pop music that much. I mean, most songs are about love and relationships and things like that. And nobody writes that many songs about tacos. So I just figured somebody had to, like, you know, fill that vacuum. And I just thought of it in a business way, that if I wrote a lot of songs about food, then I could write off my grocery bill on my taxes because it’s all, you know, it’s all inspiration.
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