Brontoforumus

Two weeks from today – Monday, Nov. 12 – we’ll be announcing the dates for my 2019 tour, which we’re calling Strings Attached.

We’re going directly from my most scaled-down, low-key show ever (this year’s Ridiculously Ill-Advised Vanity Tour) to my most full-blown, over-the-top extravaganza ever. Not only are we bringing back the costumes and the props and the big video screen, but also… every single night we’ll be performing with a FULL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA. For real. No, we’re not cramming an orchestra on our bus – it’ll be a different orchestra in every city. Sometimes it will be a “branded” local orchestra (like, say, the Colorado Symphony), and other times we’ll basically just be putting together our own orchestra with local musicians.

And yes, we’re back to PLAYING THE HITS… but we’ll also throw in a few deeps cuts too (including a couple songs that we’ve never played before – not even on the Ill-Advised Vanity Tour!) Of course it’ll be the same amazing band as always – Jim, Steve, Ruben and Bermuda – plus, for the first time ever we’ll be touring with female background singers (Lisa Popeil, Monique Donnelly and Scottie Haskell – incredible vocalists who have appeared on many of my studio recordings).

I think it’s really going to be a special show, and I can’t wait to get started! I’m not allowed to say much else about it before the 12th, but I will say that it’s basically a 3-month summer tour, and yes, we’ll be playing a bunch of places that we didn’t get around to on the last one (hello, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and the entire state of Florida!) But sadly, I’m afraid that, once again, it’s just a North American tour – hopefully we’ll hit Australia, Europe, and other parts of the world some other time.

Anyway, tickets go on sale Friday, Nov. 16 at 11:00 AM Eastern… all dates and info will be on weirdal.com. Hope to see you on the road next year!

Michael Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” remembers the force of Weird Al’s 1992 parody of Nirvana.

“ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ comes out, and it’s like the perfect voice for all the simmering anger of an entire generation of kids,” Schur said. “That song is vicious and angry and aggressive but also laconic and disaffected and scary. And it was immediately a gigantic thing in American culture. Then Weird Al does ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ and completely deflates it — the importance and seriousness and angst. That’s a service he has always provided: to remind people that rock is about grittiness and authenticity and finding your voice and relating to an audience, but it’s also fundamentally absurd. Being a rock star is stupid. We as a culture are genuflecting at the altar of these rock stars, and Weird Al comes out with this crazy curly hair and an accordion, and he just blows it all into smithereens by singing about Spam. It’s wonderful.”

Schur paused. He said there were heated debates, sometimes, in comedy writing rooms, about the merits of Weird Al’s work — some cynics argue that his jokes aren’t actually great, that people overrate them because they’re nostalgic for their childhoods. But Schur insisted that, regardless of what you think about this lyric or that lyric, Weird Al represented the deep egalitarian spirit of our culture.

“It’s a truly American thing, to be like: Get over yourself,” Schur said. “Everybody get over yourselves. Madonna, get over yourself. Kurt Cobain, get over yourself. Eminem, get over yourself. No one gets to be that important in America.”

After 10 minutes of staring at this verbal barbed wire, my brain felt as if it were starting to cramp. I told him I didn’t know how much longer I could take it. “We’re not even halfway through,” Yankovic said. We had yet to reach, for instance, his encyclopedic lists of possible rhymes, all categorized by syllable count, running on for page after page like Homer’s list of ships in the “Iliad”: “Polar bear/Voltaire,” “my back is peeling/Darjeeling.” At one point, he lined up 35 potential rhymes for the word “geek.”

Yankovic has done a version of this process for just about every song he has ever written, parody and original, from “Eat It” to today. In the years before computers, he would do everything by hand, sifting and sorting in a binder with color-coded tabs. He used to spend weeks roaming through the West Hollywood Library, compiling facts and keywords about cloning for “I Think I’m a Clone Now” or hospitals for “Like a Surgeon.” Songs that may seem dashed off are in fact the product of months of self-imposed hard labor — lonely, silent, obsessive world-building.