A Quote by Al Yankovic

In the '80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear - that if I didn't, people would soon forget about me. — © Al Yankovic
In the '80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear - that if I didn't, people would soon forget about me.
Like, in retrospect, this whole Mini-Album is about itself, and the process of letting go of the fear of what people will think about the music or of me or whatever and just putting it out there. But none of that was intentional at all.
The way the press works, people don't like to review or talk about EPs. It's considered, 'Why don't you just wait for the record?' But for someone who's creating, and the audience, they can get material quicker. I almost feel like putting out a few songs every couple months might be better than putting out an album every year or two.
My career is based on the slow build of an audience based on putting on a good show live and putting out a record every couple of years. I was already doing really well in terms of my goals, to keep my fans coming back.
Our career was based on energy and putting out a hot album.
The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.
The biggest fear that everybody has is dying. Not to get too meta on you, but I think every fear that people are trying to work out is really like I'm going to die and no one is going to care, and it doesn't matter because God might not exist. That's what people are trying to figure out. I wish we all had one fear so we could think about it together and figure out a solution, but we're all doing different things.
I like the idea of doing a little movie every week. When you do a movie, you don't know when it's going to come out. In a year, you forget about it. I forget stories that happened on set. I forget who I worked with. I forget my lines, my characters' names. This is so fresh. We make it, and it's on TV. It feels more like a living, breathing thing.
I thought that if I practiced doing melodies for a year or so at home, I would learn to think melodically, and when I went to work it would come out, and it did, on this album. What else was important to me...? I spend a lot of time in the grocery store, shopping.
I think people, unfortunately, do live in constant fear. I think the government - and people in general - create scenarios people fear, because ultimately through fear you can control people. I wish we could live in a world where there would be no fear, but it's a driving force in many decisions people make these days, whether it's personal, economic, or even job-related. A lot of people stay out of fear in a job they hate.
I think outing people is fear-based: the fear that if we don't out them, it will make things harder for all of us. It's important to treat people with love.
We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman's suffrage was right, every one would soon see the same thing, and that in a year or two, at farthest, it would be granted.
I've been performing since I was very little, about three years old. I was inspired at first by the MTV artists of the '80s and started putting on 'shows' in the apartment, most of them set to Michael Jackson's 'Bad' album. In my mind, there was a full lighting rig behind me... but it was just a couch.
I still look good. I'm trippin', but people tell me that all the time. So check it out, I'm 63, and still kicking. I've been putting records out every year.
What was great about the 80s was that you still had record companies who would get behind developing you as an artist. You had these bonkers heads of department and A&R people who, even after a flop album, would let you make another one.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, sums up the Fringe. Spend a year spitting your guts out writing a show, and people forget your name as soon as they walk out.
I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.
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