It's time for the Weird Accordion to Al column to become a real book you can hold in your hands and read on the toilet and everything!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hey y'all,
I just wanted to take some of the final hours of 2019 to thank you all very sincerely for all of the support and for answering your surveys. I've got about 60 percent of your answers so far.
Also, I should point out here that when I write up individual episodes of The Weird Al Show and season 5 of Comedy Bang! Bang! I will be posting them here so you do not have to wait until June for more "Weird Al" Yankovic content.
AND I plan to re-live this adventure with a Facebook group devoted to re-exploring the world and works of Al to be called either Al: The Big Rerun or The Weirdness: Re-Squeezed. Because, honestly, what my last three years have desperately been lacking is more conversation about Al and his life's work.
Finally, here are the amazing blurbs the book has received. I didn't ask many people but oh boy I did well. Here's what I've got so far:
“A brilliant, heartfelt cry of obsession and love for an already beloved and obsessed-over artist. Share Nathan’s madness and be freed!”—Patton Oswalt
"This book is pop culture history, music dissertation, and comedic theory. Nathan has exemplified the qualities that make Weird Al an artist who is equal parts Frank Zappa, Mel Brooks, and Mark Twain.”—Jonah Ray
“You don’t have to be a fan of Weird Al to enjoy Rabin’s raucous deep-dive into the complete discography. But if you’re not a Weird Al fan there’s clearly something wrong with you”—Alex Winter
“Wonderfully captures the quirks and fun details that have made the Yank-oeuvre ooze with oddness for almost four decades. Nathan really shows you what makes Al's mind tick. Spoiler: It's the neurons. A must read for anyone unemployed, childless, or with ninety spare hours to kill.”—Scott Aukerman
“The Weird Accordion to Al is the definitive companion to the “Weird Al” catalogue. It’s chock full of fascinating insights that left my head spinning like a Frankie Yankovic record (no relation). Nobody covers the Al canon in better depth than Nathan Rabin. It’s a must-read for the weirdos in your life. I learned so much from this VERY SPECIFIC book.”—Thomas Lennon
Happy New Year's Eve, everyone! 2019 was amazing. 2020 will truly be the Year of the Accordion.
Thanks,
Nathan
Hey you guys!
I hope this email finds you well and that you are having a groovy holiday season. I just wanted to give y'all a long overdue update on the progress of the Weird Accordion to Al book. I've been juggling lots of plates this year, and mixing all manners of metaphors, sometimes more successfully than others.
The good news is that the book is great. Felipe's illustrations are so legitimately amazing and laugh out loud funny and weirdly beautiful that I'm planning on having one tattooed on my body if we sell 2700 books or more. If we sell 27,000 then I will get another tattoo.
Al's introduction is amazing and he not only fact checked but copy-edited the book as well and while The Weird Accordion to Al was more than a little sloppy and self-indulgent in online form it's undergone a miraculous literary metamorphosis and emerged a book that's tight and cohesive and more than a little bit polished.
My goal from the outset was to make The Weird Accordion to Al available by Christmas. Unfortunately, it looks like that is not going to be possible. Publishing a physical book independently has been a huge learning process for me, particularly since I've been writing and a website the entire time simultaneously.
It's a whole other ballgame than having someone like Scribner and Abrams Image handling every everything and I learned a little too late that at this point the best my printer can do is January.
I was major league bummed to learn that BUT I think I have a fix that should work. If you pre-ordered The Weird Accordion to Al as a Christmas or Chanukah or other winter holiday gift, just email me at [email protected] with a name and an address and I will send that name and that address a lovely card explaining that a thoughtful soul pre-ordered them a copy of an amazing new book about "Weird Al" Yankovic's life's work but the schmuck what wrote and also is publishing it dropped the ball and pulled a major choke job, but that in just a few weeks they'll be holding a copy of this amazing gift to world literature in your very own hands.
So, the good news is that the book is really amazing, and Al and Felipe and our wonderful designer Mariana and myself did a really great job but the bad news is that the book will not be available in physical form until a little later than we had hoped and planned.
It will be available in digital form, however, so I will be happy to send you a PDF of the awesomeness before the Christmas break. We're right at the finish line now; we've got great blurbs from Patton Oswalt, Jonah Ray and the most excellent Alex Winter and it's nearly ready to go. I think I'll do one final pass and then dedications and to the printer it goes.
I apologize sincerely for missing my deadline but I can assure you that the end result will be worth the wait and I'll be more than happy to send you a special card explaining the delay, not unlike how they sold vouchers for Star Wars toys after they ran out in 1977 after wildly under-estimated the demand, only, you know, something that is obviously going to be worth WAY more money, in the short and long term.
Thanks, and sorry,
Nathan
Hey you all!
I'm excited to say that I'm very close to finishing the epic, two and a half year process of writing the 191 entries that will make up the Squeeze Box edition of The Weird Accordion to Al book.
I've only got five entries left to write until I'm done writing about every single song and album on the Squeeze Box album.
It's been a long journey but a good one. The best is yet to come.
I am, legit, both psyched AND pumped (both) to share the book with the world but I wanted y'all to know that more or less the entire Kickstarter campaign is up again over at Backerkit. So if you wanted to pre-order a tee-shirt or the very popular signed Weird Al: The Book/Weird Accordion to Al twofer or a digital illustration of yourself with Al done by Felipe Sobreiro you can do so now over at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Also, if you have a podcast or website or whatever and you'd like me to talk about this project for it, I would be very up for that. I'm already getting hardcore into book mode so I have a lot to say about this labor of love.
Thanks,
Nathan
Howdy y'all!
I hope this message finds you well. I know it's been a long time since I last rapped at y'all but I was so blown away by y'alls support and generosity that I was a little overwhelmed.
Thankfully I have nothing but good news to report. I've spent much of the last month revising entries on Al's first fourteen albums and am pleased to report that The Weird Accordion to Al makes so much more sense as a book than as 193 irregularly published articles on a weird dude's typo-riddled personal website.
It turns out that once you slash away all the repetition, self-indulgence and bad jokes there's a lot of great stuff in the Weird Accordion to Al. I'm almost as excited about what I'm gleefully cutting out of the final book as what I'm leaving in.
On a creative level, this finds me in soothingly familiar territory. It is, after all, my second book on "Weird Al" Yankovic. And while I've successfully executed several crowd-funding campaigns, and make most of my living through Patreon these days this is a whole different beast.
I've never been in a position to write a 400 or 500 page book, then publish it myself and sign copies and send them out all over the world along with other premiums.
Not gonna lie: it's pretty daunting. I feel very confident about the creative aspects of The Weird Accordion to Al book. I feel much less assured dealing with the technical and business details so to help me out I've hooked up with IndieGogo's Backerkit, who will help me handle many of the technical aspects of the campaign.
I don't entirely know what that means. I'm not a natural businessman. It's something I fell into sideways out of necessity but I'm confident that Backerkit, along with Kickstarter, will help me with the day to day details of doing something like this.
Also, I've settled on a date for the Squeeze Box edition of The Weird Accordion to Al, with everything in the box set, plus a book-exclusive chapter on Al and Wendy Carlos' Peter and The Wolf: November 27th, just in time for the CHRISTMAS season) and then I'm thinking a second, longer version of the book, which I'm calling The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Edition, which will feature all of that plus a chapter on the 2018 tour and entries on every episode of The Weird Al Show and the 5th season of Comedy Bang Bang, will come out in February of 2020.
Also, I hope to start writing pieces on the Weird Al show in the not too distant future and sending them to y'all as updates as a sneak preview of sorts for what's to come.
It's all very exciting and very stressful and I couldn't be more thrilled about sharing the book with the world and I apologize for any hiccups or glitches. I'm new to this whole publishing giant books independently thing but I'm confident that I've secured the help I need to do justice to a very big project about a very special performer.
Thanks!
"Nutty Nathan" Rabin