Lights, Camera, Accordion!: Eye-Popping Photographs of Weird Al Yankovic, 1981-2006 by Jon Bermuda Schwartz
As featured in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, The A.V. Club, Consequence, Mashable, Mental Floss, and more!
Weird Al Yankovic continues as one of our most beloved comedians, actors, and musicians. A skilled accordion player and lyricist, the California native not only crafts meticulous parodies, but also creates hilarious originals and pop culture-themed polkas. Now in his fifth decade of recording and performing, Al has maintained a career that has outlasted many of the artists that he has lampooned.
Since 1980, Al's drummer Jon Bermuda Schwartz has been by his side, photographing and documenting his career. Jon has taken more than 20,000 images of Al in his element: on tour, in the studio, on video sets, and backstage.
Lights, Camera, Accordion! presents over 300 images of Al, culled from Jon's personal collection of color photography, all restored from the original negatives. This exhaustive volume represents the 25 years that Jon shot Al on 35mm color film, from 1981 to 2006, before switching to digital photography. Jon additionally provides previously unheard stories and anecdotes throughout.
From Eat It and Like a Surgeon to later classics such as Smells Like Nirvana, Amish Paradise, and the Star Wars parody The Saga Begins, Lights, Camera, Accordion! showcases a body of work that spans ten albums, five Grammys, and nearly 2,000 concerts to millions of fans - and is packed with the weirdness and fun that always surrounds the undisputed king of comedic music.