“Weird Al” Yankovic has had a storied career creating song parodies of some of the biggest artists in the world. But the singer can’t seem to get over his recent appearance on the cover of Billboard.
While speaking to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Tuesday (June 10), Yankovic gushed about gracing our latest ahead of his upcoming Bigger and Weirder Tour. “That was such a big deal to me, because I grew up being obsessed with Billboard magazine,” he raved, saying that the cover slot means that an artist has “made it” in his eyes. “That was like the bible of the entertainment industry.”
The recognition was especially meaningful to him as he says his name was spelled incorrectly in his first-ever Billboard magazine appearance (whoops). “They misspelled my name, and you’d think it would be ‘Yankovic,’” he recalled, laughing. “But it was ‘Weird Owl.’”
Also on The Tonight Show, Yankovic revealed that he tried multiple times to get Princes’s approval on a song before his death in 2016. “Prince is like the one guy who was never into it, and he’s got a good sense of humor,” Yankovic began, noting that he once heard a recording of the late icon praising one of his spoofs.
“When it came to parodying one of his songs, not so much,” the musician continued, revealing that he submitted at least “half a dozen” rejected requests to Prince.
Yankovic also shared one of the ideas that never got Prince’s sign-off: a parody of the funk-pop star’s hit song “1999,” which would’ve been called “$19.99” and written in the style of a TV infomercial. “This killed me, because I thought it was going to be really funny,” Yankovic said on the late-night show.
Though Prince was never down for his songs to get the Weird Al treatment, the comedian has made joke-filled versions of hits originally by Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Queen, Police and countless other stars over the course of his decades-long career. Even Don McLean, who is supposedly hard to convince on the parody front, allowed Yankovic to put his own spin on “American Pie,” telling Billboard of the resulting Star Wars-themed “The Saga Begins,” “I thought it was better than the original.”
But because Yankovic has always been diligent about getting artist’s permissions before parodying them, he told Fallon that he won’t ever attempt to remake a Prince song in the future. “I try to respect the wishes of the artist, and he made his wishes very, very clear while he was with us,” Yankovic said on the late-night show, earning laughs from the audience.
Watch Yankovic’s full interview with Fallon above.
