Todd Rundgren talks about his new album, 'Global,' at AOL's BUILD Speaker Series in New York on Wednesday, May 6, 2015. (Evan Agostini/AP) (Evan Agostini/AP)
Few musicians have left as many fingerprints across rock as Todd Rundgren, a '70s solo favorite and the producer of bands from Badfinger to XTC. At a time when most artists turned to producers to help with their studio creations, Rundgren produced himself, playing all the instruments on albums such as 1972's "Something/Anything?" The musician hasn't slowed down: his latest projects are this year's "Global" and "Runddans," a collaboration with electronic artist Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh's Emil Nikolaisen. He'll bring his production-heavy "Global" tour to Wonder Ballroom on Friday, and has spoken extensively about his new work in recent months: we've gathered his most essential remarks.
On his 2015 tour:
"I'm going out with just a DJ and two background singers. The DJ is somewhat well known, he's not as well known as he's gonna be. His name is Dâm-Funk," he told Rock Cellar Magazine. "And he'll be essentially in charge of the sound, most of it, and I'll be in charge of fronting. And we'll be taking a lot of productions for a small tour. A lot of lights, video wall, the whole deal."
On new music:
"I've actually fallen behind a little bit. It's easy sometimes to be cynical about music that may be of a different generation," he told Paste. "It's always that old case of 'You kids today! I don't get your music, you kids!' [laughs]."
"If you watched the Grammys, you'd think that music today is just horrible. But if you go on YouTube and start poking around, you'll discover all of this really interesting, challenging, personal music being made out there that's being promoted under the radar. If you think of music strictly in terms of mainstream, you'd be led to believe Imagine Dragons is this music revolution [laughs]. But the stuff that's really happening is in that sidebar when you go on YouTube."
On how recording has changed:
"Ten years ago, an artist like Skrillex couldn't have existed, because he wouldn't be able to afford or have the resources that are now at everyone's fingertips. For $40, you can get a full digital work station on your iPad; it's called Aurea," he told Paste. "It works just like ProTools—it's got a whole mixing console on one page of it and a whole piano roll audio wave form thing with all the editing stuff that I had to pay $25,000 for in the '90s."
On his voice aging:
"It's actually gotten better in some ways. It's gotten more flexible and more dependable, I guess," he told the A.V. Club. "You would have thought that as you got older the voice would tend to deteriorate in some ways, but I always look at somebody like Tony Bennett, who is my senior, and still can hit those high notes and still can belt it out as good as he ever did. So it must be something about the voice that's unlike the rest of the muscles in your body."
On the new Runddans project:
"You know, I used to be really wild and crazy in the studio, and I've gotten a little bit more conventional lately. Not really conventional, but definitely more conventional. And this was more wild, crazy, let's just do anything we can think of," he told the A.V. Club.
On his current collaborations:
"I recently did a little collaboration with Ringo [Starr] on his new record and that's just come out. We co-wrote a song called 'Postcards From Paradise,' which is the lead single, so that was fun. I've been working on and off with The Roots on kind of an R&B-type project, but we don't have a deadline for that so I have no idea when that will be finished."
Jeff Daly/AP
On producing records:
"Sometimes you're a psychiatrist and sometimes you're a group therapist. The dynamics in between people and the misgivings sometimes that artists have when they get into the studio because they're under a different level of scrutiny," he told the A.V. Club. "A lot of them can be insecure about it. My job is not simply to make musical determinations but sometimes to just keep people from flipping out during the process."
On retirement:
"You could say that I likely won't have another album like 'Something/ Anything?,' an album that goes gold, just because the music business has changed so much. But as long as I've got an audience out there to play for, I'm going to continue to play."
On being in demand:
"It's funny, for the last twenty-some years I think, I've been doing my production independently. In other words, I finance them myself and do them at my own pace and when I have a record done, I find a distributor for it," he told Glide Magazine. "But the last two records, this one and the previous one, I've actually had a label approach me and offer me an advance to make a record, which is, well, for an artist my age, I guess, is somewhat unusual (laughs)."
On why he started writing songs:
"Actually, early, all I wanted to do was play guitar and be on the same par as Eric Clapton or something like that," he told Glide. "That's when I was first starting out in the music business and it's all I thought about. Then I came to realize that that's kind of a self-limitation in a way and that also if I was going to have a band of my own that was ever going to get signed, we were going to have to start writing our own material.
On his definition of success:
"The artists that I admire are people like B.B. King and Tony Bennett who will do it until they drop over. And that's what I'd like to be able to do. To just be able to play, physically able to do so, and that's success as a musician. Success is not having to go find another job."
On his 2015 tour:
"I'm going out with just a DJ and two background singers. The DJ is somewhat well known, he's not as well known as he's gonna be. His name is Dâm-Funk," he told Rock Cellar Magazine. "And he'll be essentially in charge of the sound, most of it, and I'll be in charge of fronting. And we'll be taking a lot of productions for a small tour. A lot of lights, video wall, the whole deal."
On new music:
"I've actually fallen behind a little bit. It's easy sometimes to be cynical about music that may be of a different generation," he told Paste. "It's always that old case of 'You kids today! I don't get your music, you kids!' [laughs]."
"If you watched the Grammys, you'd think that music today is just horrible. But if you go on YouTube and start poking around, you'll discover all of this really interesting, challenging, personal music being made out there that's being promoted under the radar. If you think of music strictly in terms of mainstream, you'd be led to believe Imagine Dragons is this music revolution [laughs]. But the stuff that's really happening is in that sidebar when you go on YouTube."
On how recording has changed:
"Ten years ago, an artist like Skrillex couldn't have existed, because he wouldn't be able to afford or have the resources that are now at everyone's fingertips. For $40, you can get a full digital work station on your iPad; it's called Aurea," he told Paste. "It works just like ProTools—it's got a whole mixing console on one page of it and a whole piano roll audio wave form thing with all the editing stuff that I had to pay $25,000 for in the '90s."
On his voice aging:
"It's actually gotten better in some ways. It's gotten more flexible and more dependable, I guess," he told the A.V. Club. "You would have thought that as you got older the voice would tend to deteriorate in some ways, but I always look at somebody like Tony Bennett, who is my senior, and still can hit those high notes and still can belt it out as good as he ever did. So it must be something about the voice that's unlike the rest of the muscles in your body."
On the new Runddans project:
"You know, I used to be really wild and crazy in the studio, and I've gotten a little bit more conventional lately. Not really conventional, but definitely more conventional. And this was more wild, crazy, let's just do anything we can think of," he told the A.V. Club.
On his current collaborations:
"I recently did a little collaboration with Ringo [Starr] on his new record and that's just come out. We co-wrote a song called 'Postcards From Paradise,' which is the lead single, so that was fun. I've been working on and off with The Roots on kind of an R&B-type project, but we don't have a deadline for that so I have no idea when that will be finished."
Jeff Daly/AP
On producing records:
"Sometimes you're a psychiatrist and sometimes you're a group therapist. The dynamics in between people and the misgivings sometimes that artists have when they get into the studio because they're under a different level of scrutiny," he told the A.V. Club. "A lot of them can be insecure about it. My job is not simply to make musical determinations but sometimes to just keep people from flipping out during the process."
On retirement:
"You could say that I likely won't have another album like 'Something/ Anything?,' an album that goes gold, just because the music business has changed so much. But as long as I've got an audience out there to play for, I'm going to continue to play."
On being in demand:
"It's funny, for the last twenty-some years I think, I've been doing my production independently. In other words, I finance them myself and do them at my own pace and when I have a record done, I find a distributor for it," he told Glide Magazine. "But the last two records, this one and the previous one, I've actually had a label approach me and offer me an advance to make a record, which is, well, for an artist my age, I guess, is somewhat unusual (laughs)."
On why he started writing songs:
"Actually, early, all I wanted to do was play guitar and be on the same par as Eric Clapton or something like that," he told Glide. "That's when I was first starting out in the music business and it's all I thought about. Then I came to realize that that's kind of a self-limitation in a way and that also if I was going to have a band of my own that was ever going to get signed, we were going to have to start writing our own material.
On his definition of success:
"The artists that I admire are people like B.B. King and Tony Bennett who will do it until they drop over. And that's what I'd like to be able to do. To just be able to play, physically able to do so, and that's success as a musician. Success is not having to go find another job."
