Close But No Cigar by Weird Al Yankovic

Album: Straight Outta Lynwood (2006)

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Songfacts®:

This song is about a cat (Voiced by Al) who falls in love with three separate girls, but he dumps each one of them for idiotic reasons. Example: "But then one day I found out that she actually owned a copy of Joe Dirt on DVD." >>>
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Ryan - Ottawa, Canada
Yankovic performs this song in the style of Cake, specifically their song "Short Skirt/Long Jacket." Like many Cake songs, it features one of the band's favorite percussion instruments, the vibraslap, which provides a distinct rattling sound thanks to the metal teeth housed in its base. Al also incorporated the instrument in his parody.
"That was inspired by a friend of mine who has been single for a very long time because he finds something incredibly picky wrong with everyone that he goes out with," Yankovic told the AV Club in 2011.

"They have a good time, but her butt's bigger than mine or some shallow little quirk that most people would be willing to overlook, but there's something always wrong. The song was inspired by that attitude, that nothing could ever be good enough.

I'd become friends with John McCrea, the lead singer of Cake. In fact, me and Ben Folds and John McCrea went bowling together, which was a pretty wild night. Cake is one of my favorite groups and they have such a distinct style that I thought would be fun to write something in the key of."
Although Straight Outta Lynwood skewers music from the mid-2000s, its title was inspired by the 1988 hip-hop album Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. (Lynwood is the name of Yankovic's California hometown.)

Comments: 1

Marge from North Granby, CtAs usual, Al has absolutely nailed CAKE in this little send-up. He makes sure to use a vibraslap to punctuate his lyrics (John McCrea of CAKE has a weakness for the instrument), "Close" has a punchy and ironical trumpet riff just like Vince DiFiore would have contributed, there's a bit of background chorus, and, best of all, some background hollering of "Oh, yeah!" and so on, just like McCrea... But while he gets all the style points, this is not musically a direct parody of any one song. Thematically, it one-ups Short Skirt/Long Jacket, itself a somewhat parodical picture of the perfect woman, but it is an original tune. Perhaps almost a tribute?

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