Todd Rundgren

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

It is yet again a very distinct honor to welcome a man of truly many, many hats. Please, everyone, give a warm hand for Mr. Todd Rundgren.

[applause]

Now, there’s the danger of sitting here for eight hours, because we won’t ever be able to possibly cover everything and anything. And what we’re going to do first is probably play a little video that he kindly provided, which gives you a little bit of a very rough overview of a lot of different directions this could be going, but we’re going to be focusing on only one or two of them. So, how about... Doing this?

(video: Medley of Todd Rundgren’s productions and his music)

Right. So, any questions at this stage? You get the idea, there’s a plethora of avenues that we could pursue now and go down. And what to do in such a case, other than restarting your computer ’cause it’s a little confused. How about starting at the very beginning? You’re from the Pennsylvania area. Philly and all of that, right?

Todd Rundgren

 Yeah, I grew up in the Philadelphia area. There is a distinct musical scene in the Philadelphia area, but at the time it mostly revolved around a label called Cameo-Parkway, and most all of their artists did dance records. They had Chubby Checker, “The Twist,” of course. And The Orlons, who do “South Street,” and “The Watusi.” And Dee Dee Sharp, “The Mashed Potatoes.” These were all dances or places to go dance. It was not particularly deep and my influences, as it turned out, had a lot to do with a DJ that we had in the Philadelphia area. His name was Jerry Blavat and he used to play pretty much exclusively R&B music. [I was] sort of fortunate to live in Philadelphia, because you’re right on almost the border line of what they would [call] the Mason-Dixon line, [which] is the southern border of Pennsylvania. It’s considered to be the boundary between the North and the South. And back in the ’50s, if you lived below that line, and in certain neighborhoods, your likelihoods of hearing certain music, particularly black music, dropped off significantly. They called black music “race records” in the South in those days, and it was kind of segregated. It was only meant to be listened to by black people. White kids weren’t supposed to listen to it, because it made you go all “jungle.” They thought that you would become crazy and wild, and a sexual fiend, or something like that, just by listening to black music. So we were fortunate to be just above that line. And we had a DJ who was a white DJ, but he wanted to try to sound black on the air, and he played pretty much exclusively R&B music. And this is the principal reason why people find a lot of similarities between me and Daryl Hall, because we all grew up in that neighborhood and we all listened to that music. I would go into my house, and my mom would be listening to Patti Page. I’d have to go out of the house to hear any decent music, but a couple doors away somebody’s got the radio on, and he’s on there playing The Coasters, or early R&B records and things like that. And so, between that and between what my parents would allow to be played in the house, I got a pretty eclectic musical exposure when I was young.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You were listening to a bit of classical as well, right?

Todd Rundgren

Yeah, my father, he was pretty strict about what could be played while he was in the house. He would only listen to contemporary classical music. Stuff that was pretty much anywhere from Debussy and Ravel, [from] French Impressionism onward. And he liked show tunes, he liked soundtracks to musicals, so I would hear a lot of that. He had a folk music phase he went through, New Christy Minstrels, and so there was a little bit of that in the house. But never would he allow actual real rock music to permeate the atmosphere. If we wanted to listen to it, we had to go up in our rooms, where he couldn’t hear it. And under no circumstances were we to put it on his record player, which he built himself. It wasn’t a stereo, it was a hi-fi that he built from plans in a magazine. And I remember one day he caught me playing my only Beatles record, and he was livid. Well, he was mad at me all the time then. But in the end that turned out to be a real advantage for me, having exposure to a broader range of music, whereas a lot of people grew up on Top 20.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I mean, Ravel is not the worst harmonic education you can get.

Todd Rundgren

Certainly not, and in some ways, it kind of just totally osmosed into me. It, without me thinking about it, totally characterized my harmonic sensibility, listening to that kind of music. As I grew older, getting into jazz, I was a camp counselor once, when I was about 16, I guess. And there was a college professor who was also working at the camp, and he kind of took a shine to me and started exposing his record collection to me, which was substantially jazz. And so I learned a lot about jazz listening to that. And at one point I got into electronic music, which in those days was a completely different process than it is nowadays, it was all tape-based, and occasionally used things like test equipment to create sounds. You know, there was no such thing in those days as a synthesizer, per se. There were just these jury-rigged piles of wires and stuff that people would build experimentally in order to explore a broader range of sound. And what I learned from listening to electronic music was that there is a dynamic element in music that has nothing to do with the notes that you’re playing. Even if you’re just using sounds, there’s still certain elements of dynamics and tension and things like that that you’re trying to create in order for it to qualify to be music, as opposed to noise. So I got into that for a while. It was, you know, a big phase, I was buying every electronic music record I could find. Most of it was from Eastern Europe, as it turned out, Hungary, and places like that. Then when I got a little older, of course, the Beatles changed everything.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

In which sense for you personally?

Todd Rundgren

Well, they came up with a formula that worked for a much broader range of musicians. Previous to the Beatles, the model was like the Elvis model. You find some pretty person, and then you find songs for them, and then you arrange the songs for them, and you stick them in the studio and they record them. And they could have, like, this much actual personal musical sensibility. They didn’t require any. In fact, there’s a famous story about an early ’60s artist named Fabian. That, essentially, a record company guy was walking down the street and he saw this handsome young Italian kid sitting on the stoop, and said, “Can you sing?” He said, “I don’t know. Maybe.” And the next thing you know, he’s got a hit record, you know? Really, he really couldn’t sing. He would do this kind of guttural growling most of the time. But he was handsome, so they put together all the pieces for him. And that was a model that only worked if you were handsome enough to front the band. And the whole idea of knowing who anybody else in the band was was kind of foreign. You only cared about the guy who was up-front. Then the Beatles came along, and suddenly you knew all four of them. They wrote all their [songs], well, they didn’t in the beginning, but eventually they came to write all their own material. And to arrange it themselves, often with the help of their producer, but it was still pretty much their project, their direction. And suddenly, this is a completely different model of success. You find a couple of guys in the neighborhood, you grow your hair, you plunk out a few tunes, something like that. Even just copy the Beatles, do Beatles covers, that’s good enough, you know, to get the girls on you. Which was the whole object.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What was your band called at the time?

Todd Rundgren

Well, I had a band in high school called Money.

[laughter]

And we essentially did a broad range of covers. A lot of stuff that was on the radio, and we’d do a Rolling Stones song, and we’d do a Beatles song. But at a certain point, one of the guys in the band, our lead singer, really got into the blues. And he became a really good harp player, and so we started learning blues music. And mixing it in with the rest of our covers. And when I graduated from high school and everybody in the band went off to do other things, I kind of arranged to meet up with a drummer friend that I had and we were gonna maybe try and start a band, but we had no real concrete plans. Left home on my 18th birthday. I just hated being at home, and felt completely liberated when I turned 18. So I left home, met up with this guy eventually, and started living at his parents’ house while we figured out what to do. And we would take regular trips to the music store in Philadelphia, just to see whether there was anyone there that we thought we might want to conscript into the band. Anyway, there was a group that was kind of hot at the time, they were called Woody’s Truck Stop. And the reason why they were hot was not so much because of the music they played, but because the lead guitar player in the band, his name was Alan Miller, and he was like a national figure, because he grew his hair long and refused to cut it, and his parents refused to make him cut it, and the school refused to allow him to attend. But he was a straight-A student. So the judge ordered the school to provide a telephone line to him at home. And there was a famous picture of him in Time magazine, of him sitting at his desk with a little speaker phone, you know, doing his studies there. So the band was kind of famous for having him, because that was his excuse for having his hair long, he was in a band. “I have to have long hair, I’m in a band!” That was my excuse all through high school. And so they were playing at a local music festival, along with The Byrds, and a band called The Shadows Of Knight. And we went to see them. And we thought, “God, they’re pretty cool.” You know? And they play blues. I know the blues. Mixed in with some R&B and stuff. I’ve played some blues, so I’m not completely unfamiliar. So we decided to go see them again at their home gig a little later, which was in a small club called the Artist Hut in Philadelphia. Held about a hundred people. And as it turned out, they were between drummers. You know, different guys were just sitting in with the band, and they couldn’t find a drummer who really worked with the band. Of course, I was with a guy who was a Buddy Rich-trained drummer, so he asked if he could jam. He sat in with him and then they started begging him to be in the band. And he stood up for me and said, “Well, I’m with him. You’ll have to put him in the band as well.” Fortunately, that made the line-up of the band exactly the same as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. And so the guy who was their rhythm guitar player, he moved up front and started playing harmonica, and I became, quote, “the rhythm guitar player.” But the one thing I knew how to do, that the other guitar player didn’t know how to do, was play slide guitar. It was kind of like a little specialty of mine. And so that got me more and more attention in the context of the band, and I became a little local celebrity at that point. But playing blues and R&B and stuff, and not even thinking about writing. You know, I had no kind of big plan. I didn’t know how long the whole gig would last. And in the end it didn’t last much more than eight or nine months. What happened is, maybe six months after I joined the band, all these records started coming out from San Francisco with the tag “acid rock.” You know, there was the Grateful Dead, and the [Jefferson] Airplane, and other sort of bands, who were kind of proud of the fact that they took drugs, and that drugs had an influence on their sound. So, suddenly this blues band decides, “We’re gonna go to the country and get our head together.” Which means, go to the country and take a lot of drugs, and come back with a whole brand-new revolutionary sound. And I was a teetotaler at the time. You know, everyone around me who was taking drugs seemed to behave so foolishly that I felt I was being superior by not taking drugs at all. And so when they decided to do that, I said, “I’m not going to the country. I don’t wanna get my head together.” And so I decided at that point I would put a band together, and that band turned out be The Nazz. What I did is, I went around to all the local bands and kind of watched them play and then, one by one, picked off the guys from the band. And we became instantly the thing to see in the Philadelphia area, for what it’s worth, but still had no idea where to go with this. But the one thing I did realize is, if it was going to succeed, I - as well as anybody else who had the capacity - was going to have to start writing material for the band. And that’s when I, by conscious decision, essentially became a songwriter. It was never a thing that I had done before that.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Can you remember your first gig with the band?

Todd Rundgren

The first song was “Hello It’s Me.” The first song I ever finished.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Maybe give that a listen in the original Nazz version, for now.

(music: The Nazz – “Hello It’s Me”)

Todd Rundgren

[comments over music] Oh, who’s that? [laughs] Makes it sound really sad.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, just for clarification, that’s not you singing.

Todd Rundgren

No, it’s not. [laughs]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, I guess it’s a little bit like when you’re having kids. You know, you wrote this song, or you were walking around with this thing for nine months, and then all of a sudden someone else holds it in his hands, or in his voice. What’s that like?

Todd Rundgren

Well, at first, you’re very self-conscious about the whole thing. Well, at least for me, I felt kind of self-conscious. I didn’t really know what I was going to write about, half the time. And in the long run, as it turned out, I was writing over and over and over again about the same relationship I had in high school, that just didn’t turn out the way I expected.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How many years did it take you to realize that?

Todd Rundgren

Oh, that was only a couple years later. I graduated high school in ’66, The Nazz’s first record came out in ’68. So, it wasn’t a whole long time, you know? But yeah, that kind of heartbreak becomes a huge inspiration in the long run. And by the time I got to an album like Something/Anything?, and finished the record and listened back to what I’d done, I realized I was digging the same hole again, over and over and over again. And that’s part of what precipitated the radical transformation that the following album represented, in which I kind of tossed any preconceived notions about songwriting out the window, and started, essentially, from scratch. Trying to build a new sensibility, or trying to listen to music in a different way, so that I wouldn’t be doing what everyone else was doing all the time. Which is essentially, you grow up listening to music and you make the assumption that that’s what music is. And if all you ever hear is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, chorus, and it’s always about some relationship with someone, well, then you start writing music and that’s the first thing you do. This is a verse, this is a chorus, and it’s all about how somebody broke my heart. And I realized that that was not what my internal life was really about. I was thinking about a lot of other sorts of ideas, a lot of different sounds. By this point, I am taking psychedelic drugs, so I’m seeing the world in a somewhat different way, and realizing that there’s more than just relationships to write about; there’s your whole inner life to draw on. So I became essentially a... Well, it’s hard to explain this. For most people, if they’ve experienced some success, this is the formula they’ve been looking for. And so they say, “I’m gonna do this again. And again and again and again, for as long as it succeeds for me.” But after the experience with The Nazz, I didn’t want to be in a band anymore, and indeed, I didn’t really want to be in the front part of the music industry. I wanted to be in the back part, where the actual product was made. So I started working for the Albert Grossman organization. Albert Grossman was the world’s premier artist manager at the time. And he had – not necessarily simultaneously – but he had Bob Dylan, he had The Band, he had Janis Joplin, he had a whole slew of folk artists, he had me, he had a couple of other more contemporary artists. But I joined the organization specifically to make records, to engineer and produce records for them. And I was still writing, I still had musical ideas I wanted to explore. So I went to the label and said, “Would you give me a budget, so I can do a solo album?” Which they did, and when I delivered the record, they were kind of taken aback, because they didn’t expect it to be so ambitious, and they also didn’t expect it to have a hit single on it, which I didn’t expect, either. And so my very first record had a radio hit on it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Which was?

Todd Rundgren

“We Gotta Get You A Woman.”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Shall we probably play that?

Todd Rundgren

With the caveat that this song does not represent this album as a whole. There’s some goofy stuff on this record.

(music: Todd Rundgren – “We Gotta Get You A Woman”)

[comments over music] This is the part of the song that got me in trouble. Because people don’t pay attention to lyrics. Until something pops out, and then they think they’ve got the whole meaning of the song. [music continues] [applause] I was sort of taken by the geeky stereo, you know? ’Cause back in those days, sometimes the studios would not have pan pots. In other words, you couldn’t place something anywhere in the stereo range you wanted. It could be center, left, or right, you know? And then they might bring in a box with a knob in it, if you insisted on having something that moved during the mix. So everything would have this really wide stereo split in those days.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I guess your shrink, if you had one at the time, had a field day when that record came out, right?

Todd Rundgren

Beats me. [laughs] As I say, the record was a hit, but it was also a problematic hit, because of people misinterpreting the lyrics. Just because I used the word “stupid,” they think I was referring to women, when I’m not referring to women, I’m talking about stupid little characteristics that people have. You know, funny little quirks and stuff like that. But there was a very militant feminist movement in those days, and radio stations were getting bomb threats over playing this song. Because some people just misinterpreted the lyrics as having some kind of blanket meaning, when it was really talking about something very specific. But, to me, the most unusual thing about the song is its nontypical form. You know, it isn’t A/B/A/B, that kind of thing. And indeed, the hookiest part of it is the very end of it, when it’s almost over. So, I obviously, at the time I was recording it, wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this is gonna be a hit single.” I just had an interesting musical idea to explore.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What was the basic musical idea? I mean, we conveniently have this little thing there. And if you could break that down, I think that would be greatly appreciated.

Todd Rundgren

Well, if I could remember it ’cause I’ve never played it live. Ironically enough, we did the song the other night on the Letterman show as well, and it was really amusing listening to the band trying to work out the background vocals. Especially, because I had such a little-boy voice back then, you know? And listening to Paul Shaffer trying to sing those falsetto notes is just hysterical. [fiddles with keyboard] Actually, listening back to it, the most interesting and signature thing to me, if I was another songwriter, you know, people always ask me about the kind of harmonic sensibility I have, and my tendency to cluster notes, or to stack the chord in a way that’s a little bit different. And it kind of all came from when I was in high school, I was a bad student. I was determined to finish high school, I didn’t want to drop out. But it was a horrible experience for me, and I didn’t like being at home. That was a horrible experience as well. And my best friend, who I might normally hang out with, he was a straight-A student, so he always had after-school activities to do. He was in the acting club, and things like that. So I would just hang around after school, killing time, so that I didn’t have to go home with the other kids, and I might go home with my friend after he was done. And the school had an auditorium with a little upright piano in it. So I would go in there after school and just plunk around on the piano, not really writing songs, but just moving around on the keyboard, figuring out things that I liked to hear. And that’s when I got into this whole sort of major #7th thing. In other words, nominally, people just play regular straight chords, especially if you’re writing on a certain kind of instrument, like a guitar. Guitar is set up and tuned to mostly play major and minor triads in certain ways. But the advantage of the keyboard as a writing instrument, that I soon discovered, is that you got all those notes right out there. You’re not limited to the six possible notes you could get on a guitar, and they don’t all have to be clustered in one area of the instrument because your hand isn’t big enough. So, for example, a C chord. [plays a C major] Now, that’s a pleasant-enough sound. And you say if you play the minor one [plays C minor], then it’s sad, and if you play the major one [plays C major], it’s happy. But people are more than just happy and sad. You know, they’re sometimes in some other sort of region, and that’s where the major 7th comes in [plays C major #7th]. This here, which is sort of like a combination of the happy and the sad, in a way. In other words, this chord is a major chord, but isn’t so uninteresting as it was. And then, of course, there’s the related minor chords, but they don’t sound as sad as they would if they were just a straight minor. You got a little bit more rich component to them. And then I started getting into things of, like, bunching notes up against each other [demonstrates], like phrasing them like this, or even like this. Seeing how close you can get the notes to each other without it turning into some sort of a blur. And at the time I was pretty much just doing this. [runs up and down using chords] And that’s where a song like “I Saw The Light” comes in. It’s my hand just locked in this position, like this. It’s like a little dog walking up and down the keyboard, with the head watching what I’m doing here, like, sniffing its crotch, or whatever. But it became almost habitual, my hand would just naturally go into that form. And by the time I got to a record like Something/ Anything?, yeah, I’m writing this. [demonstrates] Well, that sounds nice. “Moon, June, spoon / it was late last night / I was feeling something wasn’t right...” It’s like, 20 minutes later, the song is written. Which is great. Because sometimes when these things just come spilling out. I’ve found, sometimes they have a more broad appeal, I guess, to the average listener than if you’re trying to do something impressive, I suppose. Sure enough, I thought, “This is a real simple, straight-ahead, easy-to-understand song. I’ll pretend it’s a single and I’ll put it first on the record.” And I said as much in the liner notes, I said, “If I got a single, this is it. I don’t know it’s a single. But if I have one on the record, this is it.” And it became a hit record. And then I had another single off it, and then I heard a third single. I had “Hello It’s Me” come off of that as well. I essentially went back and re-recorded the first song that I ever wrote and that became a hit. But all of it was sort of based around this whole sort of way of phrasing the changes. And by the time I got to the end of Something/Anything?, I was starting to wonder whether I had not painted myself into a musical corner in some sense. And it really started to bother me when people referred to me as the male Carole King. Not because I hated Carole King, I was a big fan of Carole King.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I was about to say.

Todd Rundgren

I was a fan of Carole King, but who wants to be compared to somebody else all the time? You want other people to be compared to you, in the long run. So I just made that decision that I was going to break that formula. Whatever I did, I was going to try and destroy that particular formula to a certain degree, or at least open myself up to a lot of different ways of hearing things. And to draw more on the influences that I had had that didn’t easily fit into a pop formula. And that’s when I started doing songs like “Zen Archer,” the meaning of which is a mystery even to me. But you start to just paint pictures at a certain point. You free yourself from the whole idea of having to sing about a certain thing. And then it suddenly becomes more like painting, it suddenly is a much freer operation. “There’s nothing preventing me from going here and doing this. Why did I think there ever was?” And I had the advantage, being a record producer, of not having to link my commercial success with my artistic explorations. So this was great for me, from a musician standpoint. Drove the record label crazy because I wouldn’t stick with any one thing. Every record was a reinvention, something different. Sometimes I would go back and do something very conventional, just to make sure I didn’t lose my chops. I would do a record like Hermit Of Mink Hollow, which was just straight-ahead songwriting, but evolved into something else. In other words, the songs are not a bunch of love songs, they’re songs about a whole variety of different things. About poverty, and other things in the greater world, besides just a relationship between two people. And then after that, I’m off on another tangent. And then I feel like, at a certain point, I’m losing my guitar chops, because I’m writing so much on the piano and playing everything on the piano live, so I start a band called Utopia, so that I can play guitar. So now we’re writing progressive rock as well in a collaborative setting. We all get together in the studio and start throwing out musical ideas at each other, and trying to figure out ways to put them together. You know, all little musical modules, or a bassline, or, “We need a little something to go over top of that.” So someone else will throw some little idea they’ve been working on into the mix, and eventually, through this collaborative process we come up with music. But ultimately, in that situation, I would wind up writing the so-called songs. Now, this kind of leads to the big difference in the way I write, and what it’s sort of come to at this point. Previous to A Wizard, A True Star, I would have to go to somebody’s studio and pay them their rental fee and hire an engineer and such. And that, of course, requires a budget from a label. And at a certain point, I said, “I wanna make a certain kind of record, I wanna make the records a certain way. I wanna have a certain freedom in the studio that often you don’t have when you’re using a regular commercial studio where other people will come in and compete with you for the time.” So I built a studio. I made a reasonable amount of money doing some production, so I bought the equipment. A friend of mine had a loft in New York City, and we built the first Secret Sound. And essentially, it was our studio, our playpen. There was never a clock, nobody ever paid any rent or anything, no studio fees for it. All you had to do was show up with a reel of two-inch tape, and if nobody else was using the studio, then you just had free reign of it. And I did a lot of my productions there, and I did a lot of my albums there, until I moved to upstate New York and built another studio there for myself.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

What would be a classical recording from the time of that first Secret Sound?

Todd Rundgren

The evolution? Well, as I say, that was a luxury that few people could afford in those days. And it wasn’t yet stylish, either, to have a home studio. People still pretty much depended on regular commercial studios for their production. But the long-term effect is that now there’s an entire generation of people who do that, because everything has collapsed down to the laptop. Things happen so fast that they don’t realize that this is only within the last eight, ten years. Previous to that, the machinery was not robust enough to do real sort of digital recording without the fastest, biggest, most-packed desktop computer with DSP farm cards in them and things like that, and very expensive external interfaces and things like that. So even for a reasonably well-off, but not overly-well-funded artist might not wanna make that sort of investment. Now all you got to do is buy the laptop, which you’re gonna have anyway. You know, you’re gonna use the laptop for something. So all you need nowadays is a laptop and something like Reason and an audio interface, and you’re ready to roll. Which is essentially what I do now, I do everything on my laptop. And I will never touch Pro Tools, if I can help it, again. Indeed, I did a project recently. I was doing a little residency at Columbia University in Chicago, where they have a music department and recording department. And one of the projects I was supposed to do was take one of their groups, whose specific mandate was to record, and within, like, two evenings come up with a final recording. And I had so much trouble with Pro Tools, and I didn’t even have to operate it, but it was that typical thing, where things just become a mess after a while. You know, there’s just fragments of stuff all over the place. And so, in order to save time mixing, I had them stem everything out and I put it into Reason. And I had the thing mixed in an hour. So, for my money, I will never go back to Pro Tools, and I don’t see why anybody would. But that’s how things have evolved. And people don’t realize that it’s only even in the last few years that that kind of power has collapsed down into the laptop. It reminds me a lot of when I first started out, and I had the studio, and I had the ability to go in there and learn hands-on, spend all the time I wanted, use the studio, essentially, as part of the songwriting process. Indeed, as time went on, the recording and the songwriting process become almost the same process. In other words, you’re moving towards the final product with every iteration that you do. You start out with, say, just the most easily available drum sounds that you’ve got, on some little drum box, and you just set up a beat. And then you start figuring out a bassline. Then you start figuring out other lines and maybe changes and stuff to go over them. Then you start moving things around. Then you decide you want a better keyboard sound, so you improve that. Then you start thinking about what might be missing and compensate for that. And for me, personally, the actual so- called songwriting part of it is the very last thing that happens. I’m trying to create something that inspires me, in the end, to come up with a lyric for it. And that process has become more and more a subconscious process. In other words, it’s impossible for me to explain exactly how it works, and I can’t say that it would work necessarily for any other particular person. But I do a lot of musical research before I start a project. And particularly my recent project, because I wanted it to be a contemporary-sounding recording, so I wanted to figure out what contemporary music sounded like. I tend often to go into a sort of isolation when I go home. I don’t necessarily want to listen to a lot of music, or treat it like it’s my job to be up-to-date on everything. I want it to sort of find its way to me, sometimes. In this particular instance, I wanted to go find it wherever it happened to be. So, asked my kids, asked my friends’ kids, “What do you think is a good place to start?” And they gave me a few names, and I went to YouTube. And the great thing about using that for research is you got the sidebar there, you know, of related things. So you start in one place, couple clicks later you’re in a whole other place, unexpected place. So you don’t have to know the names of what you’re looking for, the titles of the songs or the names of the artists, you just have to have a starting place. And once you get a starting place, all of that stuff is eventually going to find its way to you. So, anyway, I essentially listened to everything that seemed relevant to what I was trying to do. That all found its way into the music. You know, the bass is a whole new instrument nowadays and requires a kind of a philosophy about how to use it nowadays. It’s much more up-front than it used to be. It’s much more highly manipulated, and if you’re not careful what you’re doing, it can totally lose its original function, which is to provide some weight to the bottom of the music. So I often find that I’m using two or three basses during the course of a song, two or three bass drums during the course of a song. Whatever is necessary at any particular point during the arrangement to make it succeed. Which is totally different than starting out with the limitations of, say, a drummer, and a guitar player, and a bass player, and only the sounds that they can make. That is a great way to make music. But it’s not the way music is made nowadays. It’s historically the way that music is made and you can still make music that way, but in terms of where the edge is, it’s really being made by lone individuals who don’t feel that they have those sort of sonic limitations.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Do you feel that liberating for you, personally?

Todd Rundgren

Well, one of the reasons why I got into this is that a lot of younger musicians have been name-checking me. I’ve been doing remixes for them, and a lot of it has to do with records that I did back in the ’70s, when we first got the studio built and it was, yeah, liberating. We had no restrictions in terms of time, in terms of sound, in terms of what you wanted to write about. We had complete blank slate. And the only limitations were our own when we didn’t understand how to work something. And often that characterizes how you ultimately get what you get out of it. People call me a multi-instrumentalist, but I really can only seriously play one instrument, and that’s the guitar. I can play the piano, but if I sing along while I’m playing the piano, I get too into the song, I completely lose track of where my hands are, it just becomes a mess. But through the years I’ve always felt that if you can find the proper setting for an instrument, you can do almost anything. So, at one point I bought an oboe. And I never actually learned how to play the oboe, but I learned how to make a sound with the oboe, and then I figured out where that sound would go in the music. Suddenly people think I’m an oboe player. Same thing with the saxophone. I could play the saxophone reasonably well. I can’t anymore, because it’s one of those things you have to do constantly if you’re gonna play it well. But for a while I was into the saxophone, and then as soon as I got enough of a embouchure to hold a note, I just figured out the bits that I could play, the modes I could play in. I’d have to write the song in the only key I knew on the saxophone, and then suddenly I’m a sax player. And I think that kind of philosophy is a real contemporary one. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert. You don’t have to start out by being an expert. It’s one of these things... It’s a process, evolving into a songwriter, or into a music writer of some kind, is not like, “Oh, I could teach you.” I can’t teach you how to write a song. I can tell you how I write songs, but I can’t teach you how to write a song. And I can make suggestions about your songwriting process, but again, in the end, I can’t implement them. For instance, one of the things that I came to realize when I was doing songwriting evaluations out at Columbia University is that it’s dangerous to write songs if you’re a singer, sometimes. Because you tend to write to your voice, you tend to write to what feels good for you to sing. But then you have these people writing songs that have only three notes in them. That they never get out of this certain range because that’s the one they’re comfortable in. And that makes for not very interesting songwriting. Sure, it’s fun for you to sing, but it isn’t that fun for me to listen to. And I think that’s an important thing for people to remember: you’ll wanna slip into habits of songwriting. You’ll want to slip into them, and it may be the habit of writing to your voice, or it may be the habit of writing to a form, or it may be the habit of writing the same subject over and over again. You know, lyrics nowadays can be very angsty. Everything’s about angst. Even though people are not naturally miserable, you’re supposed to write songs about being miserable nowadays for some reason. It’s like, how much misery can... [laughs] ...Can Thom Yorke stand?

[laughter]

I mean, are you gonna kill yourself, or what? So yeah, there are also trends in music and people tend to write to those trends. And I suppose, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. But in the end, you’re trying to convey something somebody else wouldn’t. And that’s why music has become such a subconscious process for me, that I focus really on the musical aspect of it first and create a whole foundation for whatever it is that I’m gonna do. And then I realize I’m getting near the end of the process, time to finish. Sit down, write the lyrics, sing it. And it all happens almost like automatic writing, like I’m not even controlling my hand. And the only thing that makes that possible to happen is because I’ve cooked it so long up here. A lot of people think songwriting is, “Gotta get to a piano, start making notes.” For me, that’s not it. I have to stop making notes. I have to stop doing the habitual things that I would do if I’d first sat down at the piano or picked up a guitar. I need to let my subconscious take control of this process a little bit more, so that it’ll come out in a way that’s not fully expected, you know, that even I don’t fully expect. And that way, I keep from repeating myself. Otherwise, you’re not writing to your own personal formula, and it just starts to come out sounding the same after a while.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Speaking of unexpected...

(music: Todd Rundgren – “Future”)

Now, how old were you when you wrote this?

Todd Rundgren

That’s from Liars. That’s only within the last ten years. So, I was late-fifties.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, was that somehow interrelated with your YouTube research?

Todd Rundgren

That one? There was no YouTube at the time. [laughs] Well, there was YouTube, but it was not what it is today. Yeah, that came out about 2003? 2005? I’m not sure. Might’ve been 2005. So, yeah, it’s about nine years ago.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But did someone take you down to, I don’t know, Metalheadz at Hoxton Square and play you a house record later, or what happened there?

Todd Rundgren

Liars was a record that was principally inspired, from a musical standpoint, by what was being used in commercials on television. Many of you are too young to remember what commercials sounded like for the longest time. Everything sounded like it was written in the ‘30s for an ensemble of singers, you know? And it would always be the name of the product with a zippy little melody behind it. And it was almost always composed specifically for that product. They might license a familiar tune and then put their own words on top of it. Then in the ‘80s or ‘90s, I’m not sure, someone got the brilliant idea to start licensing songs that people were familiar with. And the first one, I think, that really got everyone up in arms was the Beatles’ “Revolution.” And I don’t remember the product, it might even have been for Apple, something like that. But everyone flipped when that happened, you know? “What?! Using pop songs for commercials?! How dare you! Pop songs are for listening to outside of that context, and you’re making people think of cars and soda and whatever whenever they hear the song now. You don’t think of revolution anymore; you think of the product that the song was associated with.” So, this eventually evolved into people who placed the music and stuff like that looking for the most cutting-edge contemporary stuff, depending on what the product is for, but looking for the most cutting-edge, contemporary music that they could put into commercials to make them look hip, very today, kind of thing. And so the music was just getting a lot more interesting in commercials, and sometimes it was composed specifically, sometimes it was a commercially available song that was behind the commercial, but rarely was it a song that was written with the idea of, “This is our soap, buy our soap,” you know? “This is our product, buy our product.” It’s all more about lifestyle and setting a tone and things like that. So, the album mostly was a combination of all this music I was hearing in commercials and also a concept of using, for the most part, sounds that were, I guess, much more familiar in the ’60s. That’s not the best example, of course, but if you listen to the most of the record, you’ll hear lots of things that sound like Hammond organ, or Fender Rhodes, or very much more traditional types of instrumental sounds. But at the same time combining it with a lot of these more contemporary musical ideas. And the album, as it turned out, was hugely successful for me, in a way. And got me a whole lot of critical attention. And I can only attribute it to the fact that I was making a conscious attempt to be contemporary; that my sources were contemporary sources that everyone had access to and was familiar with. And that process must have somehow connected. And the same thing, I guess, has sort of happened with State, my most recent record. I have to confess that when I finished the record... I haven’t done a record on deadline in a very long time. Probably most of you are aware that the record industry is a different thing nowadays, and for the most part you cannot depend on getting a label, for starters. But you can’t depend on even having a record contract that lasts for more than one record. And it was sort of unusual when I got approached just about a year or so ago by a label, saying, “We will pay you to make a record, and we won’t tell you what kind of record to make.” You know? “And we want to put it out in the spring of 2013.” And so I said, “Well, you know, I hadn’t even thinking about a record, or the record I’d been thinking about was a long-term project.” And so I had to come up with a new idea right away, because, “Hey, I’m on deadline now, I got to finish it by January.” And so I decided I was going to do that research, go out and go on YouTube and listen to everything that was sort of popular and stuff. As it turns out, it’s also the kind of thing that’s appearing in commercials as well, because now everything sounds like Skrillex. Even ads for the most pedestrian things all have that Skrillex-y bass line under them.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You thought about getting a little bit of an undercut.

Todd Rundgren

What’s that?

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Did you think of getting a little bit of an undercut?

Todd Rundgren

Ah, well, I did that already. See, there’s so few things I haven’t done. Like, I had to get married on my 50th birthday just to surprise my friends.

[laughter]

So, in any case, Skrillex isn’t the only thing happening. There are whole other realms of stuff, and a lot of it is instrumental, it doesn’t necessarily have a lot of lyrics. It may have a catchy line in it, like “Bangarang” or something. But I figured my advantage is, I have a history as a songwriter, I can sing, and I can write words, which a lot of the laptop kids are challenged in doing, you know? And there’s so no reason why they should have to, they make enough progress as it is. But I figured, if I’m going to have an edge, in any case, I’m gonna have to apply my best songwriting chops to this as well.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

It sounds like you still consider this to be, like, a competitive environment, in a way.

Todd Rundgren

Well, there’s only so many hours in the day, you know? Actually, it’s not so much competitive as it is, maybe, insular, I suppose. These people all communicate with each other, and know each other fairly well. But it’s one of those things, you can’t just stride in and say, “Hey, I’ve been making records for 40 years. Let me in the club.” You know? [laughs] Or something like that. But my advantage is that a lot of artists, a lot of younger artists, do go back, even to the ’70s, to hear what was happening. They discover some of what I’ve done, and then artists like Tame Impala have decided that they want to do their version of A Wizard, A True Star. Which doesn’t sound anything like it, but it’s their take on it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Did they have the costumes, as well?

Todd Rundgren

Well, even though they’re doing a record from the ’70s, they dress like they’re in the ’60s. Bell-bottoms and stuff like that, you know? Because their whole thing is this neo-psychedelic sort of thing. And even though all of my music isn’t psychedelic, there is some signature elements in it that work for the formula as a whole. But, ironically enough, they’re doing kind of like neo-psychedelic music, and they asked me to do a dance remix for them, so... But it’s that kind of loop closing that kind of got me into this, into figuring out, “Well, why is it that they’re interested in what I used to do? Maybe I should be more interested in what I used to do,” instead of some other particular thing. And that’s when I realized I had been spending a lot of time in my so-called studio environment, with a laptop or whatever, trying to recreate the sound of natural instruments. Like, going to a whole lot of trouble to program the drums so that it sounds like a real drummer. And then I realized that there’s diminishing returns in that. It’s not necessarily what the audience cares about anymore, you know? They care about whether it’s something new to them. Whether it represents a certain kind of energy to them, a certain worldview. It isn’t just simply whether you like the tune or not, it means more than that. You know, especially since so much of this music is instrumental, it’s gotta be connected to something larger, which essentially is a cultural movement of a sort.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Speaking of cultural movements and technology and the possibilities, you did a record a little after the ’70s that sounded like this.

(music: Todd Rundgren – “Something To Fall Back On”)

So, what’s the instrument used on there?

Todd Rundgren

That was an Emulator. It’s actually one of the original samplers that used the five-inch floppy disks to store everything on. And what’s, I think, curious about that is the kind of sloppity, very human, rhythmic aspect of that song, and the reason why is because the Emulator didn’t really have a sequencer in it. As a matter of fact, there weren’t a whole lot of sequencers at all. I remember Roger Powell, a bandmate in Utopia, wrote one of the first ones, called Texture. And Stevie Wonder still uses it, because he doesn’t care what it looks like.

[laughter]

“It doesn’t have a graphical interface!” [laughs] Who cares? Yeah, I had to essentially play everything, like the whole drum part, through the entire song. And that’s why everything is kind of like ‘booiyaya’, you know, the rhythm is all over the place. Other songs on that record don’t necessarily depend on that kind of typical sound. Indeed, most of the other songs are either more strictly acapella, or it’s not an attempt to sound like a typical bass-and-drums thing. It’s a different sort of rhythmic texture. So, I wouldn’t use that as necessarily a yardstick of a whole record.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

The thing that you show in the video, is that really an Emulator?

Todd Rundgren

That was a Fairlight. But I didn’t have that at the time that I made the record. I got that afterwards, in the interim. I actually was an endorser, so I got it at a bargain price. [laughs]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Which would still be enough for a down payment of a house, I suppose.

Todd Rundgren

Yeah, it was still a pretty expensive unit. But I defrayed it by showing up at a few music shows and stuff like that, and doing that little demonstration. It was funny, everybody knows what sampling is nowadays, but in those days, it was a peculiar phenomenon.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You had Stevie [Wonder], for example, at the Cosby show, and having the whole Cosby family sing into the mic and then do a song of that. And I think the Muppets was another one, where you had one of those, “Oh, crazy, what these machines can do now”-kind of demos. Did you do any of those?

Todd Rundgren

No. We did some funny things with it sometimes when we were demo-ing it. Like, you’d get the audience to yell something out and work that into a song or something like that, and work that into a song. Yeah, there was a lot novelty to it in those days, and it was easy to abuse, as well. I think probably the best use of it, that sort of sampling technology at the time, was Trevor Horn, “Owner of A Lonely Heart,” that Yes record. When they came out, they had these big band samples all through it, which didn’t sound exactly like a big band. You know, they had that very sort of weird, dated sound, as if they had just been lifted off an old lacquer record and put it in the right places, so it wasn’t completely overused. But it was quite easy, once you got ahold of the sampling technology, to just go completely berserk with it, and some people, they did a good job. You know, Art Of Noise, they made a whole career out of that, of doing things that didn’t sound real, but still had danceability and stuff like that. That’s probably a foundational element in a lot of what’s going on nowadays, is a band like The Art Of Noise.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I kind of like how a lot of the things you’ve been doing, or a lot of the albums, you feel there’s actual themes to them, in a lot of different ways. Let me pull this one up. A very different theme to what you were doing there is this one.

(music: Todd Rundgren - “Good Vibrations”)

Now, if anyone has seen Brian Wilson performing this in the last ten years, there’s about 30, 40 people on stage, right?

Todd Rundgren

[laughs]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How many were involved in this recording?

Todd Rundgren

I had some help from other guys. Roger [Powell] gave me a lot of help. We had his wall of Moogs set up in the Bearsville studio, and so a lot of the sounds we were getting were simply imitative; they weren’t the real, original sounds, but we managed to manipulate them into sounding like stuff. For instance, that’s not real cellos, that’s a fuzz guitar, that we have manipulated sonically to sound like cellos. Because I didn’t want to pay the money to get cello players in there. The whole record, that was side one of Faithful. Faithful was a record that I made about ten years after I got into the music business. And it was essentially to represent what radio was like ten years earlier, because even by then everything had evolved to something else. See, this is a whole other story, the story of radio, and that’s also related to the whole story of the music business, and how it wound up in the state it’s in now. But by the mid-’70s, radio had already started to become overly syndicated. The idea of the independent local DJ was becoming less and less of a standard, and more of a rarity. And all of this had to do mostly with the fact that there is no other business on the planet that has an ROI like the music business. ROI means “return on investment,” and it’s not a term that means a whole lot to a musician. But it is a term that means something to an accountant, when they’re considering buying up an asset like a record label. And people discovered that you can spend... This is still the mid- / early ’70s, and most people are not spending a year in the studio making a record. They’re getting in the studio, making a record in two weeks or so. And jeez, let’s just say it cost $100,000 to make that record. If you sold a million records, at retail – in those days, maybe 12 dollars, at retail – the amount of material that’s going into the record is probably less than a dollar’s worth of actual material. Then there’s your manufacturing, shipping costs, etc. So just bump that all up to two dollars there. And you sold a million copies of that record. That’s 12 million dollars minus the two million dollars in actual costs. That’s ten million dollars on a hundred-thousand-dollar investment. Movies don’t produce that kind of return on investment, even the biggest movies. The whole number may look really huge, but that’s because James Cameron spent a billion dollars making the movie in the first place. I mean, freaking Nirvana, they made that record for a reputed less than $25,000, Nevermind. Can you imagine? Somebody who doesn’t know shit about music, they don’t know anything about the music business, but they look at that bottom line and they’re thinking, “I want a piece of that.” So, in the ’70s, as this ROI is starting to sink in to people, how much money can be made in the music business, companies that had nothing to do with music started buying up record labels, and running them from their central accounting offices. Gulf and Western, I remember, just started buying up labels and things like that. To the point that, by the time we get to the end of the ’70s, some CPA, some accountant somewhere, in some holding company, tells Warner Brothers, “This guy Van Morrison isn’t selling records like he used to. Drop him.” And obviously, this was not anyone who had anything to do with music making that kind of decision. I mean, Van was a difficult artist, I admit. But he delivered a lot of hits to Warner Brothers and then they just precipitously dropped him. And this became kind of the norm at that point. The companies were not being run by people who knew anything about music. They decided in the mid-’70s that taking a chance on a record and letting the audience decide was no longer how they wanted to do business. They wanted to apply market analysis, like they’re coming out with a new cereal, or something. And they get a test audience and they play your record for them. And the audience sits there with a little dial, you know, responding to the record. In the end they come up with a number somewhere between zero and a hundred. And report back to the record label. And if the number isn’t over, like, 85 or something like that, the label says, “Well, it’s not worth us spending the money promoting this.” That has absolutely nothing to do with whether they believe in the record or not. They just want to be covered. They want to make sure that they don’t make a false move by promoting a record that everybody likes but that doesn’t actually sell. So this is another cut at the foundation of the freaking business. You get to the ’80s and you discover that the structure is: every label wants to have a Michael Jackson, who essentially finances everyone else on the label. They’re waiting for a Michael Jackson album to come out, just so people will go out to their record store to buy it and maybe buy one other record. But not only that, all of the artists on the roster who are losing money, they get a reprieve, because now the company’s flush. You know, they put out a Michael Jackson album, now they get lots of money, they can afford to do artist development again, or artist promotion. But when the Michael Jackson’s started disappearing, that caused the collapse. But the biggest thing that brought the record labels down was a refusal to understand the evolution of their own customers, of their own audience. Signature event: Sony Walkman. Suddenly listening to music is not a quality- time event anymore. You don’t go home and unplug the phone and listen to a record all the way through like you used to. Now, you put it on your Walkman and you go out and jog, or ride on the subway and read the paper while you’re listening. The music becomes wallpaper to your life. But record-label response essentially was to start charging you tax for your cassettes. Turned into a whole piracy issue. They say, “Oh, what’s really happening is people are swapping mixtapes.” Completely ignoring the fact that people now prefer to listen to their music that way. They prefer to take it with them. Then the whole digital music phase starts to happen, and then we start to have MP3s and that sort of thing. Again, what do they do? They start suing their own customers. [laughs] They threaten and sue their own customers, not realizing this is a part of the necessary and inevitable evolution of the way people are going to get and listen to music. You couldn’t have invented digital media and simultaneously have avoided this part of the evolution of it. Once it becomes transportable, ephemeral like that, all the rules are gone. New rules. And you had better figure out what they are if you want to survive in this business. And I know this for a personal fact, because I put out a record called No World Order. And it came also in an interactive version. There was a little blurb about that in this thing, and as the result of doing that, I was approached by a interactive television experiment called the Warner Full Service Network. They had a neighborhood in Orlando, Florida, that they had completely wired up with fiber-optic cable and DSL in every house, the highest bandwidth they had at the time. Couple hundred houses in this neighborhood, and each house was supposed to get a prototype interactive TV box, which at the time was a an SGI Indigo computer - bigger than a lot of the TVs that they were supposed to sit on. And they were experimenting with things like ordering a pizza. You go onto the TV and you pick out your toppings and stuff like that, in a glitzy, interactive way. And then a little later, your pizza is delivered. So they came to me, because I had done this No World Order interactive music thing, it had a whole sort of interface and way that people could find things by, you know, subjective keys instead of actually knowing all the titles that you wanted to hear. We designed and prototyped the whole thing out, and then it came time to find out whether people really did want on-demand music services in their homes. In order to do that, had to put music on a server. So me and my manager went to the special-products divisions of every major label at the time. There were five, might have been one or two more, but five principal labels. Explained to them what was happening. Not a single one would allow music to be put on a server, none of them, not even Warner Brothers. This is the Warner Full Service Network - a division of Warners - and even Warner Brothers Records will not allow any music to be put on a server. That’s the end of that. But the upshot of that was that they had gotten themselves into such a bind with retailers like Walmart and people like that, who were still stocking the old hard product, that they couldn’t even talk about the idea of delivering directly to the customers. Any music you got had to go through a middleman, had to go through a record store or something like that. Because, essentially, you know, Walmart would simply remove all their product out of spite. But what happened? Two years later, there’s eMule, three years later, Napster. Four years later, lunch half-eaten. Ten years later, lunch gone. Just because they could not figure out how people wanted to get and listen to music. Seemed to be like the most basic thing you should understand about your business. What are your customer’s habits? What do they like? What don’t they like? They just went through the whole thing like they could establish any rule they wanted, and all of us would just abide by it. So there are no tears to be shed about the bygone record industry at this point. It was a great thing that happened. It shook out all the avaricious and hypocritical and, really, uninterested entities in the music business, and left those people who really do care about records, about artists, about promoting them. And it also created this wide-open field where you can promote yourself. You don’t need a record label. If you can put up a hot video on YouTube, you’re on your way. If you get yourself a million hits, you’re on your way. And so, in a certain sense, that old record industry model? Good riddance. It’s never coming back, thank God. [faux-cheery voice] Anyway, that’s the history of the music business.

[laughter / applause]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Seems like we need a bit of healing after all that pain.

(music: Todd Rundgren – “Healing, Part III”)

Now, this is called “Healing, Part Three,” which somehow assumes that there’s other parts as well. And the album as such, what’s the idea about that album [Healing]?

Todd Rundgren

Well, I had a theory, and it’s not an uncommon theory, that music has more than just a sort of salubrious, entertaining effect. That it can actually, under certain circumstances, affect your overall attitude and your physical well-being. And so I did an album – and this is back in the days where albums have two sides, so you think in kind of like paired concepts. It’s hard to do one whole thing of a piece, because you never know if people are going to flip the record over. So, on the first side I essentially wrote a suite of songs that was a kind of a parable or a little story, that was essentially about someone... It was discovered that they had the power to physically heal people. But the ultimate result of something like that is, are you actually helping people when you do that for them? Because, first of all, there was the Golden Goose syndrome, you know, that everybody wants a piece of this now. Or everybody wants to get his hands on them, or whatever. It just becomes one of these things where you would sometimes wish it had never happened to you. Even though it’s ostensibly supposed to be a good thing; you have the power to heal people. Suddenly everyone’s showing up and they’re not making any effort of their own anymore. They just figure, “I’ll just go to this guy, and he’ll make it all better.” So, in the end, the idea was to kind of turn the whole thing around and say, “Yeah, maybe it’s possible that people can heal other people, but wouldn’t it be much better if people could heal themselves?” Then they wouldn’t need somebody else to heal them, you know? They’d be in charge of the process themselves. But the other side was an actual attempt to see whether I could make music that would have that effect. Whether the music itself could actually have that power. So the second side is like a whole suite. It’s in three parts, but they all weave together into one sort of continuous piece of music. And the whole idea was to take people through a certain sort of mental journey, a meditation, almost, in musical terms. And to craft the music in a way that amplified that, or somehow made that process more easy, I guess. And I can’t say with absolute certainty that, in the end, something like that works for everybody all the time. But I have had people tell me that this particular exercise, this musical exercise, did actually have some effect on them. And I don’t know whether it’s an effect that a doctor would confirm, but the whole point is: it’s all in your head anyway. People are perfectly capable of making themselves well, and they’re perfectly capable of making themselves sick, without any outside influence. People eat themselves to death all the time. So, the whole idea that where your mind is at and where your body is at is somehow connected and interactive seems like a viable idea. So, making music that helps people or heals people is, I think, a potential reality and something that somebody might wanna commit their life to, their musical career, to coming up with music that’s meant simply to, not just entertain people, but to actually help them.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

At the same time, this is coming from someone who’s also characterized as, if you work with him in the studio, and you don’t want to know about your shortcomings, you better don’t enter the place. How do you deal with that human energy in getting to a really good result?

Todd Rundgren

Well, different producers have different styles. And I don’t mean just like what the records sound like in the end, though. It’s the way they work. Some producers are, for instance, former engineers who may never have had any real kind of first-hand musical experience; they only captured music for other people. So, transitioning from engineer to producer will only work if the act comes in and they know exactly what they want to do musically, and you’re just in charge of the sound. You just make sure that it sounds right. Then again, there are producers who may understand very little about the technology of making the records. I imagine George Martin probably didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to that part of it, you know? He was totally focused on the musical aspect of it, getting the music in the best possible shape. And a lot of producers, that’s their forte as well. I, early on, decided that I wanted to know how all the knobs and buttons worked. So I started out, more or less, as an engineer before I became a producer. My first project was engineering a Jesse Winchester record in Toronto, and Robbie Robertson of The Band produced it, and The Band played on it. But as a result of that, they decided they wanted me to do Stage Fright, the record they were about to start. So, it was kind of a progression from someone whose only concern was supposed to be the sound, to someone who then had to sort of deal with the personalities involved in making the sounds. And this was something I didn’t understand very well at the beginning, in some of my early projects, is that you are sometimes – or at least you’re supposed to be – the adult in the room. Sometimes you’re the only adult in the room. Bands, just because they got in the studio, doesn’t mean that they have settled all their issues before they got there. They often bring their issues right into the studio, however inappropriate that might be. I believe the studio is, for most artists, is for making music in. It’s not for arguing in. And it’s not for writing what you forgot to write in. It’s to go in with the attitude that you’re going to perform this stuff. And you’re going to perform it as if you were performing in front of an audience, if you possibly can. Now, it doesn’t always have to be like that. You know, it isn’t always about performance. As I say, these laptop things are kind of built up instead of performed. But most of the acts that I work with, they’re singers, players, stuff like that. They’re trying to capture their best performance. And I will admit that at a certain point, I may be forced to be very blunt with the act. What is my justification for being blunt with the act? Well, I’m not there to make them feel good. I’m there to tell them all the awful things that they will read about themselves if we don’t address them while we’re in the studio. Now, they may not like hearing that, but that is the whole point of my job. My job is to run interference for them in a certain way, and warn them what’s going to happen if they go ahead and do that. If you don’t write that third verse, that’s not gonna be a good song. That’s just gonna be the first verse three times. I know it’s uncomfortable doing it this way, perhaps, but if you can just forget about the fact that you’re in the studio, and do it, we’ll get it done. But if you just wanna argue about it, well, that isn’t my job. My job is not to argue with you about it. If you make the decision to do it your way, fine, do it your way. But I have warned you. I have warned you what you’re doing isn’t what you’re supposed to do. That’s my job. That’s pretty much it. That’s a simplification in some sense, because I believe my job is simply to fill in whatever’s missing in the process. If an act comes in, and they write great songs, and they know how to perform, great. I’m happy to just sit there and capture it, and have no opinion whatever. Well, I’ll have an opinion about it, I will like it, ’cause they’re doing it right. I don’t feel like I’m obligated to put my fingerprints on something that somebody does, but often an act will come into the studio, and there’s something missing in what they do. They have discomfort with the process in general, and I have to remove all those distractions for them. They’re having issues with another member of the band, and I have to somehow mediate that because it does affect the process. My nose itches. It happens when I talk too long, it’s warning me.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I think that’s something that people in the studio reality sometimes tend to overlook. It’s like, “Oh no, this person is mean to me.” Well, there’s a certain romantic allure to get something really beautiful done, and sometimes the way to achieve that is not always the prettiest.

Todd Rundgren

Well, you were playing Laura Nyro earlier in the day. Laura Nyro, who was a big songwriting influence on me. And the thing that really tipped it, I was interested in what she was doing, I liked her songwriting, but she put out an album called Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, and it just blew everybody’s mind. Everybody’s. It blew my mind, but it blew everybody’s mind, that a girl this young was singing with this much soul, and the songwriting was hers, it wasn’t like anybody else’s songwriting. And as it turned out, I met her at the time, ’cause I was such a fan, I arranged a meeting. I went to her apartment and she turned out to be, like, her pictures on her albums were very romantic-looking, but she turned out to be, a very large gipsy. And her fingernails were so long that they curled over. And when she played piano, they clattered on the keys [makes a noise] the whole time. Couldn’t figure out how they managed to record her without it becoming part of the record, you know? But I learned from her that she hated the process of making Eli And The Thirteenth Confession. She felt rushed, she felt like things didn’t get done the way that she wanted them done. Here was a record that blew everybody’s mind, and she hated the experience of making it. And that was a big lesson for me. I realized that how much you enjoy yourself in the studio isn’t necessarily a measure of progress or the quality of the final product. That sometimes someone has to drive you to the edge before that kind of tension and immediacy and urgency in the performance comes out. When someone tells you, “Well, we’ve gotta finish this up in an hour, because this is a union session and everybody’s leaving,” you’re feeling pressured. But that pressure is what’s making it more resemble a live performance. Because I worked with Laura Nyro later. She was doing a record called Mother’s Spiritual, and she had built a studio in her own house in Connecticut, and she’d been working on it for a year and making no progress, nothing happening. And I went there to try and just help her get going, to get the project started. And we did manage to get the project started. But a typical session would be, like, “Just finished take 23.” And she says, “That was a nice one. Let’s do another.” And by the time she’s done, she’s got 35 takes of a song, and then has to figure out which one to use. And quite obviously, it’s like she doesn’t even know. She doesn’t even know when it’s working or not. “That’s a nice one. Let’s do another. That’s a nice one. Let’s do another. That’s a nice one. Let’s do another. I’ll figure it out later.” You know? That makes absolutely no sense. I wanted to strangle her. And maybe that would’ve made something happen, I don’t know. [laughs] But, you know, I loved Laura, and it was kind of a shame that she never got all the recognition that she probably should have gotten. There’s just a whole generation of songwriters who will tell you that that was a really influential record.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I guess, with her work, it’s really compelling how a certain fragility gets across on the recording. How do you, personally, manage to put yourself into that space where you’re extremely fragile and just convey that thickly layered emotion?

Todd Rundgren

Well, I close my eyes. [laughs] Essentially. And when I sing live, as well. It’s just, for me, my most effective singing is just when I go into a space somewhere and kind of almost forget that I’m in the middle of a process. And just try to think about what it is I’m singing. That’s the most challenging thing, often, is that you’re trying to bring meaning to something that sometimes doesn’t have much meaning in it. You know, “Who Let The Dogs Out?” [laughs] How do you make that? OK, we’re having a party. “Who Let The Dogs Out?” We’re having a party. Alright, that solves that. But for a lot of things you’re trying to sing something and implant, convey to someone more than just the words. You want to convey more meaning, you want to convey some emotional depth in it. And, for me, the whole process is trying to get in something of a transportive state. To forget about where you are, be in the place where the song is. And it can be difficult live. There are all these different distractions. At the same time that you’re singing, you’re walking around the stage and trying not to fall off it. So you’re not 100% there. You never can be. You’d have to lay on the floor, so you wouldn’t hurt yourself. But as much as possible, that’s the place that I’m trying to get to, you know, something almost where you’re not even thinking about it, you don’t even know who’s singing at that point. It’s just coming out somehow.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

On the subject of forgetting, a lot of your writing process, you once said, comes from dreams and stuff.

Todd Rundgren

Well, it doesn’t come from dreams. What happens is I will start working on a project, and then I will start writing songs as a part of that project. So my head suddenly gets into this space of writing. And that completely spills over into my subconscious life, even when I’m sleeping. So I’ll suddenly, in the middle of this, I’ll have a dream that I’m in the studio, listening on the speakers to a song. And sometimes it’s a really simple song, something I possibly would not even write. A song like “Bang The Drum All Day,” I literally dreamed that song. I didn’t dream every single word of it, I had to kind of figure out how to move the whole thing along, but the whole chorus and everything: total, total dream. I was lucky I was at home near the studio, so I could get up, go down and capture whatever it is I remembered. I’ve had other songs, like I was in Nepal and a song that eventually became “Lost Horizon” came to me. But I was in Nepal. I didn’t have a piano, guitar, nothing. So I developed a discipline of playing the piano in my head. Of, like, visualising a piano keyboard and picking the notes out and practicing it over and over and over again. ’Cause I had to remember that song for like a month and a half, until I got home. So that was just a discipline, that particular thing. And if I hadn’t had it, I probably would’ve forgotten the entire song. And then I did a song called “The Waiting Game” on a live record. And it’s one of the most complicated songs I’ve ever done, from a vocal standpoint. It’s got four completely different vocal parts all going against each other in the chorus. And in that dream, when I dreamed that song, I dreamed I was in the studio producing Manhattan Transfer, and that’s what was coming out of the speakers. And fortunately then I was also near the studio, I was able to remember enough of it and get it down. But it was incredibly complicated in my head; I was real proud of myself when I captured maybe 75% of it.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Any questions at this stage?

Audience Member

I’m curious as to what the songs were that the young people that you were talking to, when you said that you started to search around on YouTube, directed you to? What were you listening to?

Todd Rundgren

Ah, let me see now. Well, of course, Skrillex was probably like a starting point, you know? But then I started running into artists like Tipper, and Driz, and people who are doing stuff that’s kind of almost like movie soundtracks. All sort of textural. You feel like you’re in the middle of a rainforest sometimes. And so I wanted to get some of those real organic sorts of things in. I didn’t find a whole lot of room for a lot of the straight-on glitchy stuff, you know, I got a little bit of that in there. But that’s a lot of fun, too, these kind of glitch-core records. But again, at the same time, I’m not trying to literally ape anything. Like, one of the reasons why I can’t rattle off a whole list of names is because as soon as I find something that I think appeals to me, and I might want to incorporate it, I have to stop listening to it. As demonstrated with my version of “Good Vibrations,” if I think about it too much, I will cop it literally. I will do it note for note, every aspect of it. I’ll spend hours and figure out exactly how it was done, and I will reproduce it literally. So when I hear a lot of these things, I have to put them in the back of my mind and stop, and only recall them, in a way. That way, they’ll come back imperfect, and I won’t be imitating it. I’ll only just be trying to remember it, at all. And there’s a lot of things that I discovered that I figured, “Eh, maybe not for this.” But it’s a surprising range of stuff. Like I hadn’t really listened to Bon Iver before, but I thought, “Why not? I’ll listen to Bon Iver.” I liked it, couldn’t listen to the record again until after I finished this record. Frank Ocean, you know, listened to a little Frank Ocean. Gotta stop listening to that. Can’t imitate that. You know, there’s something in there I like, but if I focus too much on it, I’m just gonna start doing it literally. So yeah, a pretty broad range of artists. Not just, you know, electronic artists, but...

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

But people would be curious about your version of going to Coachella and what happens there, and talking about your music festival experiences.

Todd Rundgren

Never been invited, so... That’s the problem. I never get invited anywhere.

Audience Member

Hi. I had a question about, when you were talking about sort of running interference for people in the studio, like, how do you navigate when you’re not getting what you want, and you’re working with...? I was gonna say a sensitive artist, but, like, most artists are sensitive? But I had someone tell me I poisoned the atmosphere once. [Rundgren laughs] Of course, a vocalist. What do you do in that situation, when you’re just not getting it, and you know they have it in them?

Todd Rundgren

Well, a worse situation than that is when the artist doesn’t want a producer anyway, and the record label makes them get one. That was XTC. Andy [Partridge] never wanted anyone else to produce his records, he always wanted to do it himself. But the end result of Andy doing that is they would never leave the studio. Because Andy had stage fright, and their entire musical life became in the studio. Soon as the record’s over, the fun’s done. And so he would drag the process out forever. He burned up so many producers, whose work I admire, but they could barely freakin’ finish with him. So there is that issue, you know, where I might not be happy with what the artist is doing, the artist isn’t happy with what I’m doing because he doesn’t even want me there. So, that can be a real drag. I don’t know if I’ve found in a situation like that, because, first of all, before I even consider taking on an artist, I say, “Send me your material.” I want to hear the songs first. If I don’t like the songs, then we don’t even discuss anything else. It’s just, “Find a different producer.” If I like the songs but there aren’t enough of them, I say, “Well, get back to me when you’ve got enough songs to make an album. I’m not gonna put faith in that you’re just gonna come up with the material by the time the record starts.” Because I’ve been caught in that bind as well. Act gets into the studio and they got six decent songs and, you know, suddenly you’ve got them to write four more of their better songs in a relatively short frame of time when you’re supposed to be actually producing music. And I try and develop some sort of a relationship with the artist. Go seem them live, meet them, have some interaction with them before you get into the studio, so you have some idea of what’s going on. That doesn’t necessarily always happen. I had never met anybody in XTC before they showed up in the studio. And, in the end, I do not waste studio time. I don’t go into the studio and allow things to devolve into non-productive other things. In other words, if I’m not getting what I want out of the artist at that particular moment, maybe I’ll get it another moment. I call the session. Session’s over. Right? We’re not gonna spend our time arguing in here. We’re not gonna spend our time trying to write a song from scratch. If you wanna use the studio to do that, fine, but I don’t have to be here for that. So I would say the best way to avoid that is: do your homework before that project starts. Sometimes you’ll meet the band and you’ll suddenly realize, “Eh, this guy’s got something of an attitude. I’m either gonna have to be prepared for it, or I’m gonna have to pass on the project.”

Audience MEmber

Nice to meet you in person, I guess. There was a moment, I want to say, like, a few years ago, and I saw the Midnight Special infomercial. They were like a infomercial, when they’re selling the DVDs from that old TV series or whatever. And I ran across that video of you and that’s kind of how I got into your music and all that. As well as the Isley Brothers cover of “Hello, It’s Me.” So I was watching the thing, and I’m like, “Yo, yo, that dude looks cool, man.” My question is more so in terms of your live shows during that time. What influenced you to dress like that, man? Was it like some David Bowie kind of... You know what I mean?

Todd Rundgren

Yeah, I know what you mean. There was an era in there where stage costumes were real big. It was an important thing. I mean, that’s where Kiss came from.

Audience Member

I wouldn’t have thought that that was how you would look listening to your music, you know what I mean?

Todd Rundgren

Yeah, and I have gone through a few looks. But that particular look that you’re talking about is a result of the fact that I used to carry a make-up and costume guy with me all the time. And he would carry a sewing machine, a Maro machine, and when he got it in his head to make something for me to wear, he would just make it. He would just show up with it, essentially. And that whole thing with the feathers on my face and stuff like that, I didn’t suggest that to him.

[laughter]

He’s over doing the Midnight Special and he says, “Oh, I got a great idea.” Yes, he was gay. “I got a terrific idea!” And next thing you know, my face is covered with feathers, I got this whole kind of outfit made out of feathers. I’m the freaking Birdman of Alcatraz. And the record company just went mental, because, as you say, the music that... “Hello It’s Me” doesn’t sound like it belongs in that outfit.

Audience Member

It did something visually. I thought it was dope, man. I did.

Todd Rundgren

Yeah, but, you know, I tend to dress myself a little bit more lately. But yeah, we do costumes all the time. I like dressing up on-stage. Sometimes it’s a hassle and I’d rather just go up in my jeans or whatever. But we’ve done these shows where we essentially theatricalize a whole album. Did one for A Wizard, A True Star, and then did one for two records, Todd and Healing. And for both of those, you know, costumes. As a matter of fact, the Wizard, A True Star show, I did 12 costume changes in 60 minutes. Essentially, a costume change every five minutes. And it was a show that nobody got to see, you know? It was hysterical, because I’d be wearing, like, three costumes at once. I’d have, like, a jumpsuit on, and then tux-and-tails on top of that, and then an astronaut suit on top of that. And what went on backstage was just hysterical, me getting in and out of these costumes.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

That’s a thing I wondered, because when I saw the show, I think I’ve never seen a higher density of over-50 white British males being so enticed by really flamboyant costumes.

Todd Rundgren

[laughs]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

It was hilarious, that in itself. ’Cause everyone was there in this checkered shirt. Like, exactly same haircuts, exactly the same glasses. Like, “We’re gonna go and see Todd the God.”

Todd Rundgren

[laughs] Well, it won’t be the last outfit I wear. I have a friend, she likes to makes clothes, and she’s made some clothes for a recent tour. And so there’s still costumery in my suitcase, I guess. Stuff that doesn’t look right on the street. But it’s always been, at least in my history, it’s always been part of it. One of the few family kind of activities we would have is every once in a while my dad would take us to see a musical. Kismet, or Music Man, or something like that, in which the costumery is an inherent part of it. Dressing up is part of it. So I always felt that one way or another your stage clothes are a certain sort of thing. [I] became really sort of conscious of it because of the Beatles. They all had their special collar-less jackets that they had made, on their first album cover. You know, they would all get matching suits made. And then, of course by the time they got to Shea Stadium, they had that weird little military look, epaulets and stuff. So everyone had to have epaulets after that. And then, of course, Magical Mystery Tour, and Sgt. Pepper, and all dressing up in the weird satin psychedelic clothes and things like that. I was just always into the clothes, and I was, in particular, into British clothes in the late ’60s. You know, when Carnaby Street and King’s Road was still where it was at. And so I was actually living with clothiers for a while in New York City, and every year I would go to England for two weeks and buy all my clothes for the year. Buy twelve pairs of crushed-velvet pants. Four velvet suits, you know? Five pairs of platform boots. And haul it all back home, spend a year wearing it, and then go back and shop again. So I have always been something of a clothes horse, I guess.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience member

Hello, thank you for being here. One of the things I really like about your music, in terms of songwriting, is the, I guess, as a listener, the element of surprise, in how the different parts of the songs are put together. It seems like a lot of thought goes into that. I would like to hear what, in your mind, is a good relationship between a verse and a chorus.

Todd Rundgren

Well, it’s funny. There’s almost, in some ways, no real distinguishing feature. You know, you figure the chorus is usually more succinct, I guess, than the verse in a way. And the chorus usually is repeated, in some sense, where the verse is maybe lyrically different all the time. But that isn’t necessarily a formula for success, as it were. You know, in the songwriting sense, not necessarily in the commercial sense. Often I’ve discovered, after going back, that I can’t figure out what to call some of the parts in the song. Because, even take a song like “I Saw The Light,” the chorus is so perfunctory, in a way, that it’s almost not a chorus. I sing a whole lot of verse-verse, you know, “It was late last night, wasn’t right, blah blah blah,” everything that rhymes with “ite.” And then a little bridge part. “You gaze up at me, the answer was plain, saw the light, in your eyes, in your eyes.” That’s it. “In your eyes” twice. That’s the whole chorus, essentially. Until it gets to the end of the song, and then I just repeat that line over and over and over again. I mean, it’s a line. It isn’t even a whole chorus. So it’s sometimes hard to distinguish these things by the sort of terminology. What is a verse? What is a chorus? I think it’s probably more legitimate to still use the term “hook.” There’s gotta be something that sticks with the user when the song is over. And it can be in any part of the song, probably. You know? It’s just gotta be something that sticks with them. And often, as a producer, I have to kind of make that judgment, whether that thing is there or not. I have to tell the artist, “Well, still something missing in here. There’s all the elements of a song, there’s all verses and choruses and stuff like that. But for some reason it wasn’t constructed in a way that any of it remains when the song has ended.” And that, I think, is a more critical element. And often it’s exactly the way that the notes and the words get paired up. Often, the most difficult thing about the songwriting process is finding the right-sounding syllables. It’s the difference between the meaning and what it sounds like when you’re actually singing. So, there are just some things that are too clumsy sometimes to be stated in the most obvious way. You got to find a really roundabout way of trying to get the same idea out, so there’s a difference between singing and talking. Singing, you have to say is probably some extension of our sense of musicality in the world, in general. The sound of a bell. The sound of a... We were taking a little tour here, and it’s interesting to me the menagerie downstairs, with the microphones on it. You know, trying to capture sounds essentially from nature, trying to find the musicality that naturally exists in nature. And the problem with the human world is it’s full of artifice, it’s full of artificiality. Things that we invent that would never exist in nature. And the whole idea, I think, in terms of music, is in some way getting back to nature. Getting back to what people just find naturally pleasant to hear. And a lot of that is choosing the exact syllable you sing, with a certain note, and stuff like that. Again, with that caveat, in terms of songwriting, you don’t want to be writing to your favorite way of singing. It’ll limit your writing in the long term. And I’ve always used my writing as a way to extend my singing. I didn’t start out as a singer. I learned to sing relatively late in life. And that’s really hard. I mean, most people, they become singers when they’re young, when they’re in their teens. They say, “I like to sing, and I’m gonna sing,” and they have that abandon, and by the time they get to the age where you might have a career in it, you develop the the physical things that you need. Your diaphragm gets developed. Your ability to control your throat gets developed, in order to properly hit the pitch, and all of that sort of stuff. So that by the time you’re 19 or 20 and you’re in a band, you can stand up there and bellow your heart out all you want. Me, when “We Gotta Get You A Woman” came out, and I had to get out on the road and support it, I couldn’t sing a 40-minute set. That’s how long a set was in those days, 40 minutes. And I couldn’t get halfway through it without blowing my voice out. And that didn’t stop me, though. I continued to write out of my practical range. As long as I could hit the note in the studio, that was all I cared about. And so I had to set kind of like a bar for myself, so that when I finally got serious about the live performance, I was strengthening my instrument the entire time. You know? Getting better. My voice is in better shape today than it’s been in my entire life. Works better for me now than it ever has, for some reason. And that’s probably one of the remarkable things about the voice. I mean, Tony Bennett, I don’t get it. How the hell does he do that? You know? How does he hit those notes? You know? And he’s 20 years older than I am. So, it’s one of those things that I think is possible for anyone. Anyone could potentially become a singer if I can, starting from scratch, from nothing. From being principally able to hold a tune and little else. But my songwriting has been part of that whole evolution, that I write material sometimes that’s at the extremes of my range to force myself to get better at singing in that part of my range.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Looks like this is a really good moment to thank you very much for coming along and sharing with us. So, Todd Rundgren, everybody.