Weird Al Yankovic doesn’t age so much as he mutates—still the king of parody, still the most self-aware man in music, and still the only artist who can drop an accordion-driven medley of pop smashes and make the internet collectively lose its mind. His latest release, Pokemania, is a decade-crushing whirlwind of #1 hits, from Taylor to Billie to whoever else found themselves briefly untouchable between 2014 and 2024.
“I wanted to pick a dozen songs that encapsulated the zeitgeist of the last ten years,” Al tells me. “Just number ones. The songs that defined the decade.”
That’s the understatement of the century. Yankovic’s new medley folds pop’s biggest moments into a single, high-speed spectacle—the kind of thing that sounds impossible until you remember this is the guy who made Coolio, Nirvana, and Chamillionaire all part of the same cultural fabric. The way he describes it, the process isn’t mystical so much as mathematical.
“It’s not like that Beautiful Mind thing where the parts start floating around your head,” he says, laughing. “It’s more trial and error. Once I know which songs I’m using, I just start trying things—what segues naturally, what keeps the flow going. It’s like building a roller coaster: you want it to feel like it’s always heading somewhere, but no one should know exactly where.”
Four decades in, Al is still pulling it off. The man’s creative stamina alone is an anomaly in pop culture—most people stop discovering new music by the time they hit 30. He’s now 65 and still neck-deep in it.
“I’m still aware of what’s going on,” he says. “I listen to the radio, and my daughter keeps me current—she’s 21, and when we’re driving, she’s got the aux. So, you know, if something’s on my radar as a certified old person, it must be a pretty big hit.”
That line—half self-deprecating, half factual—is classic Weird Al. The guy who once defined cool by making it deeply uncool has now become one of the few remaining bridges between generations. He remembers when hits were inescapable because they were everywhere: “MTV put something in heavy rotation, and everyone knew it,” he says. “It was easier to tell what had really captured the public imagination.”
Now? “The monoculture’s gone. It’s splintered. It’s harder to find those universal hits,” he says. “Having a whole decade to pick through made my job a little easier.”
It’s a strange nostalgia coming from a man who’s made a career out of breaking the pop machine apart and reassembling it into something weirder. But that balance—loving the system while laughing at it—has always been Yankovic’s trick. And even as the album format crumbles, he seems completely unfazed.
“I saw the shift happening,” he says. “Albums were diminishing, streaming was rising, and I was getting frustrated waiting until I had twelve songs before releasing them. Now I can just put something out whenever I feel like it. It’s liberating.”
The irony, of course, is that his last traditional record, 2014’s Mandatory Fun, was the first comedy album ever to debut at number one. “It was also the first comedy record to hit number one since 1963,” he says. “So, yeah, good time to quit.”
He laughs again—the laugh of someone who’s earned the right to retire from expectations. “I’m not saying I’ll never do another project. I just don’t think there’ll be another traditional Weird Al album. But there’ll always be new stuff. Soundtracks, singles, collaborations, whatever’s fun.”
And fun, for Al, usually means experimentation. He lights up when I mention his “animation jam” videos—collaborative projects with dozens of animators contributing ten seconds apiece to create a chaotic visual accompaniment to his medleys. “That idea goes back to Marv Newland,” he says. “He did Bambi Meets Godzilla in the ’70s. I thought, ‘That’d be perfect for this.’ It adds that extra layer of insanity.”
But while he’ll never stop reinventing, Al’s also a sentimentalist. This year marks the 40th anniversary of In 3-D, the album that broke him through with “Eat It,” “I Lost on Jeopardy,” and the immortal “King of Suede.” “That was your entry point?” he asks, grinning. “Yeah, I remember writing ‘That Boy Could Dance’—partly inspired by The Kinks, partly by the fact that I’m a terrible dancer. I’ll flail onstage, but that’s not dancing. David Byrne calls it ‘movement,’ so maybe that’s what I’m doing.”
The truth is, Al’s “movement” has always been forward. Even when he tours his back catalog, he refuses to stay static. His “Vanity Tours” of recent years—performances devoted entirely to his original songs—were both an act of defiance and pure self-indulgence. “It wasn’t about proving anything,” he insists. “It was just fun. After years of the big production shows with costumes and video screens, I wanted to go out, sit on a stool with the band, and just play. For the hardcore fans. That’s it.”
Still, the world keeps asking for more. And while he can’t spill details, he hints that a handful of new film and TV projects are in development. “I’ve learned not to talk about things before they’re real,” he says. “But there are a lot of exciting things on the horizon.”
That horizon’s been Al’s playground since 1979—long before viral hits or TikTok jokes. He’s survived every pop era by refusing to pick a lane, and now, four decades in, he’s still having more fun than the people he’s parodying.
“I’m not trying to prove anything,” he shrugs. “I just do what’s fun. And sometimes what’s fun turns out to be a career.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
