Top Ten Cover Songs Performed By "Weird Al" Yankovic on His "Ridiculously Self Indulgent..." Tour
The "Ridiculously Self Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour" is Weird Al's latest tour to date (October 2018), running from February to June of 2018. Unlike previous tours, however, he didn't perform with his typical costumes, he and the whole band would sit down throughout the show, and he concentrated on deeper cuts and original material while changing the set list each night. In addition, during the encore, he would cover a different song by a variety of artists; that's what this list is about. I encourage you to listen to these covers (someone uploaded all of them to YouTube); they're really cool.
Before they played the song, Weird Al talked about how offended he was by the song. But he wasn't offended by the lyrics, no- he was offended by the fact that a song called "Squeeze Box" didn't even have an accordion in it! He decided to set things right by playing his own accordion solo.
He performed this song in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Throughout the whole show, he'd been talking about playing the song "Albuquerque" throughout the show (which he normally does when he plays in New Mexico). He introduced the cover by saying "Here's a little song about AAAL-ABAMA! ". (In case you're wondering, yes, he did eventually play "Albuquerque".)
It's so weird hearing Weird Al do a punk song- but I love it. He also covered "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols.
He performed this song at Cal Poly, saying that he used to sing it in his open-mic years- needless to say, he nailed the words. It's not an easy song to sing.
This cover rocks pretty hard. They also did a rendition of "Suffragette City" that was pretty good.
Throughout the whole concert, the band would frequently play a short snippet of the song as a joke. They eventually played the whole thing at the end.
"Weird Al" is famous for never learning to play the guitar (despite pretending to play it on a few songs). He decided to make his guitar playing debut by playing the guitar solo to Cinnamon Girl- which, as any music fan would tell you, is made up of only one note played several times. Needless to say, Al nailed the solo.
Much like the cover of the Elements, Weird Al shows off his ability to sing fast-paced patter songs.
They covered Wipe Out, but with a twist- they played it in four different keys! At the same time! And yes, the crowd still cheered afterwards.
It's Classical Gas but with a twist - Weird Al plays accordion! Apparently, Al said that Classical Gas was the first record he bought as a kid, and he learned how to play it on accordion when he was ten years old.