‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and His Bigger & Weirder Band Play a Joyful NPR Tiny Desk Concert
The great “Weird Al” Yankovic and his Bigger & Weirder touring band performed a joyful NPR Tiny Desk concert, opening with the darkly humorous “Skipper Dan”, a Weezer-style pastiche reminiscent of Weezer’s “Pork and Beans”.
For “Weird Al” Yankovic — pop parodist, comedy lifer, occasional movie and TV star, and improver of countless adolescences — coming up with a fresh set of songs for the Tiny Desk was never going to be an issue. …And the band he’s brought to the Tiny Desk has grown from the lean, unplugged configuration that graced our stage in 2010 to a high-spirited and electrified crowd of players.
They also played “The Saga Begins”, “eBay”, and “Now You Know” from the “totally true” biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Yankovic focused on originals the first time around, but for this show he brought parodies of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“The Saga Begins,” from 1999’s Running with Scissors) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (“eBay,” from 2003’s Poodle Hat), as well as the Weezer pastiche “Skipper Dan,” from 2011’s Alpocalypse. And, for fans of the breathtakingly factual 2022 biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, he performs the film’s Emmy-losing closing-credits blues-rock jam “Now You Know.”
The 2010 ‘Weird Al’ Tiny Desk Concert
