When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an architect, because when I was 12 years old I had a guidance counselor that convinced me that that was the best career choice for me.
I'm always a little leery about doing shows where I'm not the headliner because when I first started playing in 1982 I opened for Missing Persons and got pelted for 45 minutes. After that, I made the decision to headline no matter what, even if I was playing to seven people. I wanted people to be there to see me.
It's hard to say, I picked one of my favorite articles for the MAD vault. Which is one of the features of the Magazine so they don't have to actually pay artists or writers to come up with new stuff.
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.
I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.
There's a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody. There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea. Some songs are too repetitive for me to be able to fashion a humorous set of lyrics around. Some songs flat-out just don't work creatively for me.
I've always known that if I recorded an album, it would come out, and people would enjoy it! Whereas if I wrote a movie script, chances are better than even that I'd just be another guy in L.A. with a movie script in his drawer.
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.