Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (soundtrack)

Background

The original score was composed by Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson, who also worked on Cobra Kai (2018–2025). Birenberg and Robinson discussed the film's music with Eric Appel and "Weird Al" Yankovic. While the film was being scored, Yankovic interacted with the crew through Zoom due to his touring schedule. Speaking on his creative collaboration with Yankovic, Birenberg said "he's an awesome guy to work with, because he's obviously so creative and such a visionary, but he also knows how much direction to give and to let people do their thing to make it as good as possible".^[12] On doing parody music, Robinson added that "you almost 'cue' the audience where to laugh a little bit. So the way you'll structure a specific build or a specific hit will be designed to tee up a punchline that exists in the on-camera work. And when you just play it straight, you're still hitting things and still building, but you're doing it in a way that you want the audience to be like, 'Yeah, I'm in it. This is a sweet action movie.' That's the difference."^[13][14]

Composition

The accordion was used as the primary instrument in the score, played by Cory Pesaturo. On using an accordion for the themes, Robinson explained that the process was "insanely difficult", because of the nature of accordion playing, essentially balancing the aspects of an accordion and piano, while constantly bellowing. "[T]hat's what makes the sound, is the air being pushed out through these reeds that are in it ... your brain needs to be doing these three totally independent things and putting them together to execute the music."^[13] Robinson added that Yankovic knew of many varieties of accordions from various countries that have different sounds for different genres.^[12] In addition to the accordion, Birenberg and Robinson used orchestral music to complement the score, but also had accordion playing in some pieces.

According to Birenberg and Robinson, some of the sequences, including the reconciliation between Yankovic and his dad, Yankovic's speech, his meeting with Dr. Demento and the dinner fight sequence, were "fun to score". The theme for Al's speech was the first cue written and presented for the film, which was appreciated by Appel for its unique composition and style.^[12] The diner fight had a John Wick-styled musical score, which was played by accordion, which Robinson described as a "fun thing to do".^[12] For the first meeting between Yankovic and Madonna, Robinson had preferred his version of Yankovic's theme, vocalized by Madonna, that resulted in a "romantic", "over-the-top" piano piece which was scored, to do "a funny Madonna vibe".^[13]

For Dr. Demento and Al's meeting, the initial version was "almost telling the audience that they should be laughing" and was rejected by Appel.^[13] The second version had a more "aspirational and emotional thread",^[13] similar to Robert Zemeckis' films from the 1990s.^[12]

Sound design and mixing

The re-recordings for the soundtrack were mixed by Tony Solis, while Anthony Vanchure served as supervising sound editor and sound design was provided by Mike James Gallagher. Phil McGowan mixed Birenberg and Robinson's score was mixed by Phil McGowan.^[15][11][16]

Both Gallagher and Vanchure discussed sound design in a music-themed film with Yankovic, who provided instructions on producing each sound uniquely. Vanchure called it a challenge "when you are doing audio for film because you have music, and that is helping tell the story, and then you also have the sound effects that we are using to help tell the story and with this movie, not only do we have Weird Al songs, but we also have a fantastic score by our composers, and it also is dependent on seeing how you mix a scene you need to keep playing it back a couple of times and go, “all right, what are we feeling, what's carrying the scene more.”"^[17]