Weird Al Yankovic may look a bit crazy and play funny parodies of popular songs, but in real life he's as down to earth as anyone you'll meet.

That doesn't mean he's not as funny as his music–he is. But as far as "rock stars" go, he's pretty well-adjusted. Al brings his parody music to the Calvin Theatre stage on Sunday. He took a few minutes from his current tour to chat about his career and music.

You are obviously a talented musician and creative guy. And despite all the massive success you bad, have you ever regretted taking the road you did? Would you have rather pursued writing your own music and following that path?

Not really. Sometimes I wonder whether I should've called myself "Weird Al" (laughs) but I really enjoy my niche. I like doing comedy and I like doing funny music and I don't feel there have been any things I haven't been able to do. I get to fulfill my rockstar fantasies but I also get to do comedy which is my other big passion in life. I've seen some other people who have had success doing comedy music and then they go, "Now that I've got your attention here's my real music. (Laughs) But that's not me. This is what I do and this is what I love to do.

What song of yours made you realize that you might have something to build on?

There are several times when that happened and each time was bigger than the previous one. The first time that happened was with "My Balogna" which was my original bathroom recording that Dr. Demento played. I was in college at the time and I got a postcard from him telling me it had been number one on his "Funny Five" for two weeks in a row. And I thought, "What? That's insane. This is the high point of my life. It'll never get bigger than this." Then I got my record deal and I had "I Love Rocky Road" and it made the charts and I thought "I can't believe this." And then "Eat It" came out which was my first big bona fide hit. It was international and it was huge. That was when I became, for better or worse, a celebrity. That's when people started recognizing me on the street. MTV put me in heavy rotation and that was the real start of it.

You mentioned getting a record deal. How did you pitch that idea to record company? It seems like a hard thing to try to do because record companies are notably conservative about signing acts like you.

Yeah, I had a manager by that time so he was the one mostly knocking on the doors. But yes, it was a hard sell because no one knew what to make of me. They'd say, "Yeah, this is funny, this is clever, this is great, but we're not interested." Probably because they couldn't point to someone else who has success doing what I was doing. Because novelty music was the domain of one-hit wonders. They thought "Yeah, you may have a hit or two but then you'll just become a footnote." So my career is kind of ironic because I was never meant to last this long.

How do you decide which songs to parody? Is it a matter of them being well-known or is it just something that strikes you about certain songs?

It's a little bit of all of the above. Normally, I would just go for songs that are big hits. I'll make a list of songs that I think would be good possibilities for parody and then try to think of as many variations on the theme as I can and see if there's some angle I can take to make them funny. Sometimes it's the other way around. I'll think of a subject matter that's very topical and I might pair it with a classic rock song. Sometimes it's very elusive and it takes me a long time to put the right elements together.

You have to get permission to use songs to parody. And it seems like some artists were very open to the idea while others may not have been. Was it hard to get permission sometimes and what is that process like?

Generally I'm not the one who deals with it. That's more part of my manager's job description. But sometimes he throws up his hands and says that he can't get a hold of people and if I really want it, it's up to me. Then it's an artist-to-artist thing. And generally artists have pretty good senses of humor. The people that stand in the way are their managers or publishers or record labels or whomever. But I find if I can get to the artist, they usually get the joke. And I've had to do that a few times in my life one of them being, famously, Nirvana. I had to call up Kurt Cobain while he was on the set of "Saturday Night Live!" and he couldn't have been nicer. He thought it was a great idea.