Todd Rundgren Quotes

#1. Kids don't want to dye their whole head another color; that's what their mothers do.

Todd Rundgren

#2. When I got out of high school, I joined a local blues band in Philadelphia - Woody's Truck Stop.

Todd Rundgren

#3. So I don't think I'm gonna pull my head into my shell just because a bunch of people start acting like idiots.

Todd Rundgren

#4. It's great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.

Todd Rundgren

#5. Singles needed to come back. And what I tried to do in my online experiment was to change the rules for myself and make available at a more regular pace the fruits of my labour, for people who decided they wanted to support my recordings.

Todd Rundgren

#6. It's nearly redundant to enumerate the reasons The Beatles are important. There are probably different reasons why The Beatles are important to a musician like myself and to the millions of Beatles fans who just enjoy listening to the music.

Todd Rundgren

#7. I want to be known as a professional weirdo. There aren't many Salvador Dalis or Buckminster Fullers left. If I become popular enough, I can establish the next step for records.

Todd Rundgren

#8. Don't sit and wait - For the world on a plate - (It's not a stroke of luck or chance) - Just draw a bead on that sucker, and drive!

Todd Rundgren

#9. You do have a modicum of peace of mind here, but it's as unsettled as any other place.

Todd Rundgren

#10. So there was a way for you to get promoted and survive as an artist without worrying about AM radio hits.

Todd Rundgren

#11. If you went crazy, would you know it?

Todd Rundgren

#12. One Long Year was just a song here and there, and it was meant to reflect the mood that I was in but unfortunately it also reflected too little of any particular thing rather than hanging together as a whole album.

Todd Rundgren

#13. Because of the way the record business has kind of stumbled and disintegrated, in a way, you're as likely to sell records at your merch table at your gigs as you are to sell them in a regular record outlet or even online.

Todd Rundgren

#14. People got a little too self-conscious about the techniques that go into recording because sometimes, if you sing too well in tune, people accuse you of auto-tuning. It's like you have to use auto-detuning or something.

Todd Rundgren

#15. I can't stand Beyonce. The way she sells it so hard, constantly. Everything is shoved right in your face. Like, you don't have the sense to make a judgment of your own.

Todd Rundgren

#16. When you're all alone, love one another.

Todd Rundgren

#17. I certainly have a fascination with pop music as a musical form, not necessarily as a lifelong commitment. I guess you could say I'm like a Casanova of music. I can't seem to settle down with one musical form.

Todd Rundgren

#18. I got it into my head that I had somewhat neglected the guitar, and then I did a record called 'Arena,' and it was not a particularly bad record - it wasn't a bad record at all, but it was built around a certain concept, which is a guitar quartet, with a little bit of augmentation here and there.

Todd Rundgren

#19. I'm a guitar player, really - I mean, first and foremost - I grew up with all that great 1960s music, in terms of growing up, becoming a musician, so it's like first-love stuff; I'm always going to go back to it.

Todd Rundgren

#20. Every day when I get home from work, I feel so frustrated, my boss is a jerk.

Todd Rundgren

#21. Music is the way I understand how to communicate now, the way that I've learned how to communicate ... but it will eventually have to go beyond that. You see, I've realised that music is not what keeps people involved - it's the attitude behind the music.

Todd Rundgren

#22. Every once in a while, we have some sort of movement in music that everyone suddenly wants to work in, like grunge or rap or disco or some other musical phase, and then suddenly, that'll be the thing to do.

Todd Rundgren

#23. It's hard for me to say that what I'm doing isn't even really music, because deep inside of me, what I want to do is much greater than music.

Todd Rundgren

#24. There must be a God because he made me.

Todd Rundgren

#25. I never thought a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland or anywhere else was a good idea.

Todd Rundgren

#26. Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.

Todd Rundgren

#27. In a way, I created Utopia as a platform for me to become more of a guitar player and less of the kind of balladeer that people were taking me for.

Todd Rundgren

#28. When I got out of the Nazz, I had it in my mind that simply to be eclectic was an important aspect of making music. It was something that I derived from The Beatles.

Todd Rundgren

#29. I've got billions of sparrows to worry about as well as everything else'. So there's the whole idea that whatever it is that you believe, it can never be valid unless you have some consensus reality demonstration.

Todd Rundgren

#30. The Nazz survived for 18 months - that was my first taste of fame on some level and of the overall experience of being in a band. There are good and bad aspects, and I got to taste some of both, and, well, it's not as much fun as what you see in 'A Hard Day's Night,' let me just say that.

Todd Rundgren

#31. I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

Todd Rundgren

#32. Everyone has been a witness sometime - It doesn't change it if you don't believe.

Todd Rundgren

#33. I didn't expect to become an artist. I was not comfortable going out on the road.

Todd Rundgren

#34. There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.

Todd Rundgren

#35. I used to have sort of mixed feelings about a producer whose only skills seemed to be going into the studio, schmoozing the artists and making them feel good. I can see now that in some cases, that's what you have to do because that's the only way you're going to get them to produce.

Todd Rundgren

#36. I get my sticks and go out to the shed, and I pound on that drum like it was my boss's head.

Todd Rundgren

#37. Once I go on stage, the atmosphere is totally theatrical. The greater the illusion, the greater the intensity of the excitement it creates.

Todd Rundgren

#38. I am a laptop boy. People say: 'Where's your studio?' I say: 'It's in my laptop, in my rucksack.'

Todd Rundgren

#39. I wonder how many eggs are in the golden goose?

Todd Rundgren

#40. I don't want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day.

Todd Rundgren

#41. As much as I'd like to be listening to other things, I can't do that until I get all of this sort of put to bed.

Todd Rundgren

#42. The God that can only love something like this man. And from then on it was all downhill.

Todd Rundgren

#43. Look upon yourself only with compassion.

Todd Rundgren

#44. I'd like to continue to play until I drop dead on stage or something.

Todd Rundgren

#45. My senses tell me hubba.

Todd Rundgren

#46. Before there were any sort of 'recordings' there was performance. If we are devolved back to the Stone Age tomorrow, there will be performance.

Todd Rundgren

#47. It's the only way that YOUR life is gonna have any value to you. If you're just living the same life that everybody else is living what's the point?

Todd Rundgren

#48. People who have memorized your songs-how can you not love them?

Todd Rundgren

#49. My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs.

Todd Rundgren

#50. If all you have is faith, then you never actually know anything.

Todd Rundgren

#51. The New York Dolls did not think of themselves as punk rock. There was no such term at the time. They were just another band in what was called the New York scene.

Todd Rundgren

#52. I figure it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if I make a successful arena rock record, I'll wind up playing arenas! I wouldn't mind being back in that kind of venue because of the kinds of things you can do with production. You can make your shows more interesting, which would be fun to do.

Todd Rundgren

#53. If I have an opportunity to do something safe or something challenging, I'll often choose the latter. Sometimes, the objective is to submerge my viewpoint with the artist.

Todd Rundgren

#54. I never look for music by genre. I look for an artist who puts a dependable trademark on things. Like Elvis Costello - he's a great songwriter who presents his songs in a number of contexts. I feel the same about my own music.

Todd Rundgren

#55. When you come to a place like Kauai, you don't go for a high tech world.

Todd Rundgren

#56. On occasion, I hear a rearrangement of a song that really makes me reevaluate it in a way.

Todd Rundgren

#57. Today I saw a car crush my little dog under it's wheel.

Todd Rundgren

#58. I know that I could make this world peaceful and calm, if I only could get my hands on a hydrogen bomb.

Todd Rundgren

#59. Most people outside of America won't get it. It's the Easter bunny. It's another lie and I don't understand why we had to invent this character.

Todd Rundgren

#60. It may not necessarily reflect my current frame of mind. Sometimes I have to put myself at the point in time of the voice that I'm trying to sing with.

Todd Rundgren

#61. There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it's possible, and invest their whole selves in that.

Todd Rundgren

#62. That's what I like about Frank Ocean or Bon Iver - they try to capture a feeling in the most sincere way.

Todd Rundgren

#63. While I used to make my living principally as a record producer, as time went on, I had to depend more and more on my live performances because of the evolution of the record industry, which has de-emphasized what made it possible to make a living.

Todd Rundgren

#64. And so it's inescapable and people who proclaim scrupulous honesty can only proclaim that if they don't examine closely the things they believe.

Todd Rundgren

#65. It seems like there are two worlds out there - one that has revolved around 'Breaking Bad,' and then the one that I've been in, which just kind of observes it from afar.

Todd Rundgren

#66. I decided early on that I wanted to be Michael Bloomfield, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton - not George Harrison.

Todd Rundgren

#67. Celebrities are the fodder of much of the media business, so they're always interested in making you seem provocative when you're not, or trying to bring you some sort of embarrassment by revealing something you'd rather not have revealed. That's the downside of celebrity.

Todd Rundgren

#68. It was always remarkable to me how ignorant the labels were of the listening habits of their own customers, and how obstinate they were in denying those habits and then trying to essentially alter those habits instead of retooling their business to adapt to them.

Todd Rundgren

#69. Sometimes you could tell what it was about - it was interesting - and sometimes it was quite obvious that someone had lost it and it was on an endless loop.

Todd Rundgren

#70. It seems like a totally gratuitous myth to tell people a giant rabbit comes round at night leaving candy in a haphazard way around the house ... and the cover shows the bunny caught in the act.

Todd Rundgren

#71. Love between the ugly, is the most beautiful love of all

Todd Rundgren

#72. If bearing a reputation as a weirdo is all it takes to be a genius, I'm a shoo-in. Come to think of it, half the people I know are geniuses - the other half, peculiarly enough, idiots.

Todd Rundgren

#73. I'll come around to see you once in a while, or if I ever need a reason to smile, and spend the night if you think I should.

Todd Rundgren

#74. Sometimes being a musician has little to do with viability and everything to do with survivability. Many musicians start out great, and they wind up out of the business in 10 years.

Todd Rundgren

#75. I'm not a one-hit wonder as some suggest. I've had a couple of hits, but still, all of my hits were in the '70s. There was pretty much nothing in the '80s, '90s, or in the first full decade into the next millennium.

Todd Rundgren

#76. My father was not really into popular music; I had to learn about that for myself.

Todd Rundgren

#77. It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.

Todd Rundgren

#78. I prefer hallucinations cause they tend to make more sense than experience.

Todd Rundgren

#79. I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.

Todd Rundgren

#80. The Toddstock thing is the closest thing, I have to say, a Grateful Dead sort of thing where it all lapses over from the formality of a concert into more of a lifestyle thing.

Todd Rundgren

#81. If you're familiar enough with my body of work, my voice is a familiar totem, in a sense. I guess I have something characteristic in the way that I sing, although I'm not very personally self-conscious about it, so I don't think about it that much. But when I hear the record I can tell it's me.

Todd Rundgren

#82. Most people didn't have the bandwidth to download whole albums. And so it brought back this cherry picking idea that the audience would focus on certain songs and possibly be the impetus behind what eventually got on AM radio: the single or whatever.

Todd Rundgren

#83. I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.

Todd Rundgren

#84. People write me letters and say I should answer them. But I don't like to answer letters. I don't write letters. I've never written my mother one.

Todd Rundgren

#85. I don't have a long history of hit singles of my own. I had a few, and I had a little hot streak in the '70s, but I've had a lot of success producing other people.

Todd Rundgren

#86. If you will, then you will, for nothing can withstand your will. As your faith is, so you are, where your mind is there you are.

Todd Rundgren

#87. The problem turned out to be that I never was that kind of an artist.

Todd Rundgren

#88. People get comfort from music. They get joy from it and understanding from it, and most of all, the average person can't do without it in some sense.

Todd Rundgren