It is morning in Hawaii and on the island of Kauai, Todd Rundgren is beginning his day. “The sun is out. It’s balmy,” he says. “Probably somewhere in the high 70s and getting up into the 80s today.” Earlier, he went outside, chose a couple of oranges from one of his trees and juiced them himself. “Filter wide open, by the way,” he says. “You need your fibre!” Then he made one perfectly scrambled egg. “Some day,” he promises, “I’ll show you how to make that.”
Rundgren has lived on Kauai since 1995. Aside from the climate and the orange trees, one appeal is its time zone. Out in the Pacific Ocean, three hours behind the US west coast, Hawaii is quite removed from the rest of the world. “So,” he says, “one of the unique advantages is that, by the time I get up and start moving, everything’s happened already.” Down the line, his voice is warm and leisurely. “The stock market’s already closed. There’s nothing for me to fret about. It’s already happened.”
It suits Rundgren to be so out of step. For more than 50 years, the singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist has occupied his own space and time in the musical cosmos: a defiant, confounding genius, capable of wheeling out such big hits as Hello It’s Me, Bang the Drum All Day and I Saw the Light, while also producing the likes of New York Dolls, Meat Loaf and Hall & Oates, while also blazing a trail for bedroom auteurs via his 1973 album A Wizard, a True Star.
Space Force, Rundgren’s latest album, is another example of creative contrariness: a cross-genre, cross-generational collaborative record that sees the 74-year-old tackling abandoned tracks from the careers of such artists as the Roots and the Lemon Twigs, as well as new collaborations with the likes of Sparks. Its release coincides with something of an ascendant moment in Rundgren’s career. In recent times his music has been reconsidered and celebrated afresh by a new generation, his songs appearing on soundtracks for Licorice Pizza, Ozark, the Sex and the City reboot and The Worst Person in the World. Not so long ago, Chris Martin even asked if he could sample his track Healing, Pt 1.
He sounds bemused by this rush of interest. “I think it’s great if it ultimately translates into people discovering music they’ve never heard,” he laughs. “If you’re around long enough, you have to constantly reconstitute your audience. But it doesn’t necessarily change my personal trajectory.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Rundgren struggled at school. “At the time, there was no such thing as ADHD,” he says, “but that’s what I had.” Unable to pay attention for more than three minutes, he hid at the back of the classroom. “But eventually I found in music the thing that gave order to what was in my head.”
He played in local blues acts before enjoying some success with the rock band Nazz. But new musical influences, and a mounting fascination with production, led him in another direction. He re-emerged in 1970 with a Laura Nyro-inspired solo album, Runt, and over the next five decades production work, 25 solo albums and other projects such as Utopia allowed him to explore varieties of sound, style and songwriting.
The way that Rundgren speaks about songwriting today displays a certain acceptance of his own method. “I have musical ideas all the time, and those are easy to articulate, arrange and map out. The hardest thing, especially if you’ve written some 300 songs, is coming up with a new idea. So I don’t rush the lyrics ever.” Instead, he spends a long time contemplating what a song is about. “And then it gets to a certain – I don’t know – critical mass. Then I sit down and in 20 minutes I write out the entire song almost like automatic writing.”
In tandem with his adventures in songwriting, Rundgren has pursued an exploration of his own mind that has encompassed experimentation with drugs including marijuana, Ritalin and a host of psychedelics. On occasion, this has led to some questionable choices – for instance, the stage set for the tour of Ra, the 1977 album by Utopia, cost $250,000 and included a 6.7m-high pyramid and a golden sphinx. But at other points it has resulted in some of his most profound musical work: A Wizard, a True Star, fuelled by DMT, psilocybin, mescaline and possibly – the details are sketchy – LSD, was intended as a kind of psychedelic “flight plan”, and might be regarded as a precursor to Jon Hopkins’ recent Music for Psychedelic Therapy.
It followed Something/Anything?, his most straightforward pop album. “I came to the realisation – and it wasn’t just the drugs – that I was writing to the pop music form that had existed before I ever started writing,” Rundgren explains. “I realised this is me doing a really good job of imitating something else, but this isn’t necessarily coming from me.” It dawned on him that there were “all these other musical ideas in my head that had never been expressed or maybe couldn’t be expressed in a typical pop song format,” he says. “So I thought: what if I made a record and I just unfiltered everything? Don’t think of things necessarily as songs, they could just be a little musical passage that comes and goes, and then you’re on to another – just the way that when you’re taking psychedelic drugs it’s hard to maintain long, linear thoughts.”
The album sold poorly, but today Wizard is largely regarded as his masterpiece, cited as an influence by everyone from Prince to Frank Ocean, Trent Reznor to Tame Impala, and even at the time met with broad critical acclaim. “Understanding through musical sensation,” Patti Smith wrote in Creem, “Todd Rundgren is preparing us for a generation of frenzied children who will dream in animation.”
It is easy to see Rundgren as a visionary. Throughout his career he has been an early and enthusiastic adopter of technological advancement, from creating pioneering computer graphics software to virtual touring. When we speak today, he is quick to cite the benefits of the laptop as recording studio. He is a fan of digital and disdainful of those who fetishise analogue. Space Force, he points out, was due for release more than a year ago but due to the great vinyl delay had to be pushed back. “Freaking Adele decided she would put a record out on vinyl,” he groans. It took him back to the last great vinyl shortage of the early 1970s. “I was totally happy when vinyl was out of the picture,” he says. “The shortages, the quality control, the limitations of how much music you could put on, and all of the things you had to do to the music to make it fit on there. You would have to often roll off the low end of the record so it wouldn’t skip. Now with digital formats you can restore all that; you can put as much low end as you want on it.”
Space Force grew out of 2017’s duets album White Knight. This time, he approached the tracks more as a producer than a songwriter, asking his collaborators whether they had “a song or an idea that essentially got orphaned, that started out a real good idea but they couldn’t figure out how to finish it, or they got distracted and moved on to other things and then the song just sat there”. Rundgren then took the orphaned demos and, with the writers’ cooperation, made them into fully fledged songs with new arrangements, re-recordings and performances of his own.
It proved a rewarding creative experience. “One of the principal reasons I got into the collaborative thing was I spent so much time working on my own stuff alone that I’m kind of in an echo chamber,” he explains. “And you never know whether what you’re doing is still fresh or interesting or challenging because you don’t have any outside input.” Now replenished, he is eager for the album to be out in the world so he can move on to new projects. “I’ve gotten to the point where I think I’ve collaborated enough and it’s time for me to reprocess all that into new music of my own,” he says. “But you can say I’ve broadened my language a little bit through the collaborations.”
Rundgren is always trying to broaden his influences, seeking new music, consulting his children on what he should be listening to – but even then, it can be challenging. “It’s very hard to find artists who are sincerely musical nowadays, who haven’t simply leveraged their internet celebrity into a musical career,” he says. “The music is just mediocre.” He wonders whether people still form the same intimate attachment to songs as he did growing up. “Then, most of the music you got exposed to was the Top 40 on the radio,” he says. “Nowadays I open my newsreader and there’s 20 artists whose names sound like they’re internet passwords and you’ve never heard their music.”
Still, he keeps looking. “I have to be constantly absorbing new ideas or at least seriously pondering new ideas. I have this obsession with not repeating stuff that’s already been done. Not only what I’ve done already, but whatever other people have done.” He insists that commercial success does not motivate him; rather, the promise of perhaps creating something he believes is truly unique.
“I have a reputation, put it that way, for not doing the same thing all the time,” he says, his voice rich with understatement. “That’s not the same thing as having carved out something special for myself. And so at some point – and that point may be sooner than later since I’m 74 – I’m going to recommit myself to trying to come up with something that is minimally derivative and maximally unique.” One day, just maybe, the world might catch up.
Space Force is released on 14 October via Cleopatra Records