Weird Al Yankovic went back to the NPR Tiny Desk with eight players behind him, a long way from the lean unplugged setup he brought to the same corner in 2010. The set ran to four songs and, unlike that first visit, it leaned on the pop parodies rather than the originals.
The order was Skipper Dan, eBay, Now You Know and The Saga Begins. Skipper Dan is the Weezer pastiche off 2011's Alpocalypse. eBay, from 2003's Poodle Hat, rewrites the Backstreet Boys song I Want It That Way. The Saga Begins, from 1999's Running with Scissors, does the same job on Don McLean's American Pie.
Now You Know is the odd one out, an original rather than a rewrite. It is the blues-rock jam that runs under the closing credits of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, the 2022 biopic, and NPR describes it as the film's Emmy-losing closing number, so the award went elsewhere.
The band was nine deep counting Yankovic, who sang and played keys. Jim West took guitar, Steve Jay bass and Jon Schwartz drums, with Chad Thomas on a second set of keys and Payton Rose Velligan on a second guitar. Monique Donnelly played tambourine, Scheila Gonzalez covered alto and baritone sax, Probyn Gregory played trumpet, and six of the eight sang backing vocals as well.
NPR's write-up put a marker down on his standing, calling him a should-be Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and then floated a return booking for the summer of 2042, when he would be 82, on condition that he brings a string section.
The desk has turned into a place acts use to reintroduce themselves: Audrey Hobert marked the first anniversary of her debut album with one. Yankovic hardly needed the introduction, and he has been working his own archive elsewhere this year, putting the lost Al's Brain film and its song on YouTube. The trade he works in stays legally awkward for everyone else, as Cledus T. Judd found when Sony ordered his Ella Langley parody pulled. Three of the four songs at the desk were built on somebody else's; the fourth came from his own film.
The facts
- This was Yankovic's second Tiny Desk Concert, after a 2010 appearance.
- The setlist was Skipper Dan, eBay, Now You Know and The Saga Begins.
- Skipper Dan is a Weezer pastiche from 2011's Alpocalypse.
- eBay, from 2003's Poodle Hat, parodies the Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way.
- The Saga Begins, from 1999's Running with Scissors, parodies American Pie.
- Now You Know closes the 2022 film Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
- NPR describes Now You Know as Emmy-losing.
- Nine musicians played, with Yankovic on vocals and keys.
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