I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.
I'm free to do what I please, I'm probably not going to do albums. Just because I think releasing tracks as singles is a better way for me to stay topical.
I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don't realize there's a lot of craft behind the comedy.
It fit pretty nicely into my schedule because we'd pretty much finished the bulk of promotion for Mandatory Fun and were just getting geared up for the World Tour so this was a nice time for me to be working on it.
Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.
My process for the parodies is that I get an idea for a song and then get approval from the artist and then go in and record it and probably try to get it out as soon as possible.