The Happy Place Is Proud to Announce The Weird Accordion to Al: The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Edition, Due Out July 27th — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

When you’re doing a crowd-funding campaign it makes sense to establish “stretch goals.” The idea is to encourage pledges by promising premiums if you meet or surpass your goals. For example, when I did the Kickstarter campaign for the Weird Accordion to Al book my stretch goals dictated that if I surpassed 12,000 dollars I would write about every episode of the 1997 cult Saturday morning children’s program The Weird Al Show and if I hit 15,000 dollars then I would write about all twenty episodes of Al’s season as the band-leader/sidekick on the fifth and final season of Comedy Bang! Bang!

Looking back, I did not need to set such perversely time and labor-intensive stretch goals. I probably could have promised to cover Al’s movie UHF and 1985 video The Compleat Al as my stretch goals and raised just as much money. But I am pleased to say that the initial campaign for the book raised over 16,000 dollars.

That was absolutely wonderful and much appreciated. But it also ensured that I would have to do an enormous amount of work on top of the enormous amount of work involved in the original incarnation of The Weird Accordion to Al, namely writing about every single track on every “Weird Al” Yankovic album over a period of three years, particularly since I also promised to cover UHF and The Compleat Al as well as Al’s 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour in addition to all 13 episodes of The Weird Al Show and 20 episodes of Comedy Bang! Bang!

As I write in the afterword to the extended edition of the book, The Weird Accordion to Al: The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Edition, having to essentially write an entire second book about Al’s television, movie and live career after finishing an epic book about his complete discography was like running your first marathon and feeling overcome with pride and exhaustion and achievement, and then being informed that you need to run an additional ten miles immediately in order for it to count.

I don’t just like the original incarnation of The Weird Accordion to Al: I fucking love it. For weeks after the first box of The Weird Accordion to Al arrived I would lovingly flip through copies of me and Felipe Sobreiro’s book, admiring his wonderful artwork and revisiting favorite passages and songs. So when I queried the five hundred people who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign for the book about which version they wanted and 400 of the 500 patrons chose the extended version of the book I understood but I was also a bit frustrated.

I had a great book! It was finished! I was ready to stick it in a package and send it proudly to patrons. Now I had to spend long months writing a second edition of the book I was worried would not have an audience beyond the 400 wonderful lunatics who wanted a 600 page book about “Weird Al” Yankovic so much they were willing to wait an additional five or six months for me to finish it rather than settle for a flimsy 382 page guide to the life’s work of the “Eat It” guy.

“Theme From Rocky XIII Rye or the Kaiser”

From a value perspective, these patrons’ choice made all kinds of sense. Of course you’re going to want more rather than less but I had a devil of a time fitting all that extra work into my schedule without falling behind on my work for this website and podcast with the quarantine and pandemic and all.

I hoped to publish the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour edition of The Weird Accordion to Al at the end of this month but that proved overly optimistic. Thankfully I finished the first draft of the expanded version today so I now hope to publish the book around July 27th or so.

I am overjoyed to report that the winning team from the original version of the book has returned.

My wonderful illustrator Felipe has really outdone himself with new illustrations for the new material and some additional illustrations for songs as well as a brand new cover. My brilliant book designer Mariana is returning as well and Al himself once again volunteered to fact-check and copy-edit the bonus material for the book.

How crazy is that? Musical legend “Weird Al” Yankovic will once again spend some of his extraordinarily valuable, precious time fixing my commas and typos and word crimes. I could not be more excited. That really speaks to what a good dude he is, and also how much he believes in the work of Felipe and myself.

The extended version of the book is so good, and so long, and has so much exclusive material that I’m hoping that people who bought the original version will want to buy this one as well, since there’s so much new stuff.

I made enough money from the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al and this website that I was able to dig myself at least partially out of a mountain of crushing credit card debt. I hope to keep the momentum going strong with this new edition.

It’s taken me a very long time to get to this place with the book and my career but I can assure you that it will most assuredly be worth the wait.

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

And of course you can always buy the original version of the book here