Songs For Now

Something of a musical polymath – a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, composer, videomaker, mixing and mastering engineer, and producer – Todd Rundgren is nothing if not prolific. He has written everything from straightahead pop to fusion and even, surprisingly, on his latest album, State, the odd tongue-in-cheek disco track. State is album number 24 under his own name, but in terms of what he has been involved in, that's just scratching the surface. You can add two albums with his '60s garage pop band Nazz and nine with his experimental outfit Utopia, alongside a stack of production credits on albums by, among many others, the New York Dolls, Grand Funk Railroad, Hall & Oates, XTC, Bad Religion, The Tubes and most notoriously Meatloaf's ridiculously successful Bat Out Of Hell.

On the line from Chicago at the time of this interview back in April, Rundgren was about to do a “music college residence” where he was helping a number of ensembles learn his material for a performance a week later. Then he had two weeks off before the start of the State world tour that will bring him back to Australia, just six months after he was last here, in February, touring as part of Ringo Starr's All Starr Band, on which it was obvious the multi-instrumentalist was having enormous fun.

“Well, it's hard not to. It's probably one of the best gigs in all of music,” he admits with a laugh. “You know, it's always great to work with other players, especially other players that you get along with well, and we all get along really well together – and it's great to play with a Beatle! And it's great to play Beatle music too. I mean, we all grew up with it and although he doesn't seem like it, Ringo's half a generation older at least than all of us, so we were all kids when he was doin' it, and it kinda takes us all back to that, you know, 'innocent time', every time we play With A Little Help From My Friends.”

Rundgren was 16 when Beatlemania hit the States, but his first band, Woody's Truck Stop, were more in the Stones mould. It was Nazz, which he formed in 1967 with fellow Woody's Truck Stop escapee, bass player Carson Van Osten, that put him on the international map, albeit four years after a single he wrote for them, Open My Eyes, was included in the infamous Nuggets compilation. By the time Nuggets was released in 1972, he was two albums into his solo career, the third, 1973's A Wizard, A True Star, the first indication of the progressive rock streak in his writing that would lead the following year to the formation of Utopia, many of whose original members played on the album.

“I've had the advantage also of a second job that paid me pretty well,” Rundgren, whose biggest (and probably only significant) hit, Can We Still Be Friends?, came in 1978, reaching #29 in the US charts, admits with another chuckle, “which was producing records for other people. The end result of that is not just the fact that I get paid to make a record; I get to learn about other people's music. Every production I've done I've taken something away from it to use in my own music in some sense or another.

“And also the necessity to kind of stay up on what, you know, people are listening to, just in case somebody asks you to make a commercial record! It's a great advantage to an artist to be able to have the constant refreshment of working with other artists and trying to put their material in the best light.”

While his latest album, State, written, performed and produced entirely by himself (bar some guest vocals on the track Something From Nothing) was, like all his albums, made to satisfy his own musical muse rather than any potential commercial interest, Rundgren still ended up “doing the research” in a sense, “staying up”, with what people are listening to.

“Well, I wanted to make a record that sounded current,” he explains. “You know, that didn't necessarily sound like… an insular project, like I just went off and hid somewhere and made a rant on everybody. And the reason for that is because I haven't had, for a very long time [laughs], a label that more or less contracted the record. Most all of my records in recent years, I find the wherewithal to get them completed and then I have to go out and find someone to distribute them. So the whole idea that somebody was putting their faith in me made me feel to a certain degree obligated to give them a record that wouldn't be too difficult for them to sell.”

That “somebody” is Mark Powell, whose label Esoteric Recordings – 'the home of progressive, psychedelic and classic rock' – an imprint of the Cherry Red Records group, has released State, putting Rundgren alongside fellow “prog” artists Ken Hensley of Uriah Heep, Steve Hackett of Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator among others. As for Rundgren's “research”, he turned to his kids for a few pointers.

“I wasn't completely in the dark,” he chuckles, “but I was kind of surprised at how creative and boundary-pushing a lot of what is happening and what's going on in the business is. You sort of lose sight of how much has happened in such a short time and the end result is just a lot of really interesting stuff.

“More and more, and particularly in this record, I'm trying to get away from sensation, I guess. I want the process to be as organic and in some ways subconscious as I can make it, and so as time goes on I spend less and less time actually, 'quote', making the music – i.e. sitting in front of a screen, composing and arranging and that sort of thing, and I spend more and more time just pondering on what I'm going to do.

“I don't want people to think, though, that I'm sitting around trying to figure out what they'll like and then that's what I do. I'm trying to convey some real thing about myself to them. Since that's the biggest concern, that's what I wrote about ultimately!”

When Rundgren toured here with Ringo, he got to play three of his own songs in the set, but was then reminded that, “ironically, the only thing that qualified as a 'hit' record in Australia was the song we forgot to rehearse,” he admits with another laugh, “which apparently is Can We Still Be Friends? So I was just getting that everywhere I went. I blanked is all I can say – I didn't realise that anybody cared! So that'll be part of the set this tour.“