One of the hardest things I've had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.
When I started out, I didn't feel like I was really accepted in the music or comedy communities, and I was somewhere on the edge, but now I feel like I'm accepted in both, which is extremely gratifying.
In the '80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they're not all good!
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.
I start with a comprehensive list of all the recent songs that have been big hits - and then I go down that list and see if I can come up with funny ideas for them. I can always come up with ideas, but not necessarily good ones!
It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I've ever done, so it's a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.
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.
If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I'd love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.