"Weird Al" Yankovic [ tickets ]'s musical track record is no joke.

Over the course of a 25-year career, he has amassed 25 gold and platinum albums in the U.S., Canada and Australia, as well as four gold-certified home videos, two GRAMMY^®s (in eight nominations), and received an MTV Video Music Award nomination for "Smells Like Nirvana," which Rolling Stone named among its Top 100 Music Videos of All Time. His best-selling album, 1995's "Bad Hair Day," reached No. 14 on the Billboard 200 album chart, stayed on the charts for 56 weeks and went double platinum.

Not bad for an accordion player from Lynwood, CA.

The humble, self-effacing Yankovic parodies everyone from the Backstreet Boys and Nelly to Avril Lavigne and Eminem on his latest release, "Poodle Hat," which features guest appearances by keyboardist Ben Folds on the original "Why Does This Always Happen To Me," and guitarist Dweezil Zappa on "Genius In France," a tribute to the late Frank Zappa. Of note, while Eminem allowed Yankovic to record "Couch Potato" (performed to the hit "Lose Yourself"), the rapper refused to let the parodist film an accompanying video.

Yankovic spoke with liveDaily while his tour was visiting Ft. Wayne, IN.

liveDaily: Do you look at Billboard charts to decide what's worth parodying, or is it paying attention to MTV and seeing who is becoming more of a visual icon?

"Weird Al" Yankovic: I just try to keep my pulse of what's popular. I use a lot of common sense, and Billboard certainly helps, but I can't just look at the singles charts anymore. Maybe 20 years ago that was a good indication of what the hit songs were, but it really isn't these days. I pretty much have to look at all the charts—the sales charts, the MTV playlists, the album charts, and kind of put them all together to form some corroboration as to what a popular song is. Pop music has gotten very segmented, there's not that many crossover hits, so you just have to use your best judgment as to what most people would recognize.

Some people, like Eminem, are obvious. He is one talented guy, with a lot a humor in his work.

Yeah, he's got a great sense of humor, and he's really skillful at putting rhymes together. So sure, I have a great affinity for what he's doing.

There was much written about his refusal to let you do the "Couch Potato" video. Is there any relationship there now?

Our relationship is purely platonic. All of those rumors are totally false. I just want to put that to rest right now. [laughs] Really, the whole controversy about him not letting me do a video, it got a lot of attention at the time. It was very disappointing, but I'm thankful that Marshall let me do the song. It was really a drag that I wasn't going to be able to do a video for it, because that was going to be our big video for this album. We were in pre-production, it was going to be a very ambitious undertaking, and we got the phone call too late in the game to be able to switch gears and start working on a different video. So as it turns out, there's no video for this album. It's still doing quite well, but I'm sure it would have done better had there been a nice video for it.

While you're known for the direct parodies, a lot of people don't know the musical "style" parodies you do--original songs, but obviously done in the style of a particular group. For instance, "Dare To Be Stupid" was Devo, "Mr. Popeil" was the B-52s, "Germs" was Nine Inch Nails, and you've gone all out on the new record with "Bob" and the Zappa-fied "Genius In France." "Bob" is in the style of Bob Dylan, where every line of the song is a palindrome. How long did it take you to put that together?

I wrote it in 2002 because that was the year of the palindrome, so I figured it was worthwhile to write a palindrome song. I started putting some palindromes together, and as I was doing that I was kind of singing them, and the song was sounding like it should mean something, but it didn't really. It was kind of evocative of something, but hard to decipher. And then I started singing it in kind of a nasal voice, and I thought, "Well, this is a Bob Dylan song." Then I thought, "Even the name Bob is a palindrome, so there's serendipity right there. I've got to make this a Bob Dylan parody."

You even got the Zappa family involved with "Genius In France, " with Dweezil playing some guitar. What was he like?

He was very cool. I told him that I wanted him to do the opening solo, and that I wanted it to be somewhat reminiscent of the solo on "I'm the Slime." So he comes in with this green guitar and says, "Well, this is the guitar that dad used on 'I'm the Slime.'" Well … okay! [laughs] That's authentic enough. I've known Dweezil for many years, and he's a great guy, and obviously an incredible guitar player. He just banged out. … I think he did like three solos, and they were all incredible, and I said, 'Uh, let's use number two.' [laughs]

How big is the tour?

We're limiting the size of this tour because I've got a baby daughter, so I don't want to be away from home for like a year and a half, like on the last tour. But this current leg is about three months, and I get to go home every two weeks for about four days, so we have little breaks built into the tour. We're going to Australia in October, which is great because we've never toured outside of North America before. We're all very excited about that. And it's very likely that we'll be touring for maybe six weeks in the spring next year, and maybe another six weeks in the summer, but that hasn't been decided yet. The "Poodle Hat" tour will continue!