1970–1984: Bearsville era Runt and Ballad of Todd Rundgren Following a period where he thought he would never return to being a performing artist, Rundgren approached Grossman with the idea of what would become his debut solo record,
Runt. Although his general attitude for any project was to "make the record [I] wanted to make and then hope the label can find a way to promote it", Rundgren ensured that any loss to Grossman would be minimal: "I didn't get an actual advance for
Runt. I just asked for a recording budget to pay the studio costs. ... I had no idea how much money I even had in the bank. If I needed cash, I would show up at the accountants and they would just give me hundreds or thousands of dollars." Released in mid-1970,
Runt was not originally credited to Rundgren due to his anxieties about starting a full-fledged solo career, and instead bore the moniker "Runt". The album featured a bright sound and songs inspired by Laura Nyro. It was recorded with the 19-year-old bassist
Tony Fox Sales and his 16-year-old brother
Hunt Sales on drums.
Nazz engineer James Lowe returned for the sessions and recalled that Rundgren seemed "more able to really lead a group. If you go back and listen to it, it's very sophisticated material, especially for a guy so young." Lead single "
We Gotta Get You a Woman" reached number 20 on the
Billboard charts. As he prepared a follow-up LP, he produced
Halfnelson, the debut album by the band that would later become
Sparks. Members
Ron and
Russell Mael later credited Rundgren with launching Sparks' career. Rundgren's industry reputation grew substantially as a result of his success with
Runt, and for the first time in his life, he began using recreational drugs. Initially this was limited to
marijuana. He said that the drug gave him "a whole different sensibility about time and space and order" that influenced the writing for his second album,
Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren. The material was mostly piano ballads and still largely based on Nyro's template, but a more conscious effort by Rundgren was made to refine his music and choice of subject matter, and to distinguish himself from his influences. Released May 1971,
The Ballad of Todd Rundgren bore two singles, "Be Nice to Me" and "A Long Time, a Long Way to Go", neither of which repeated the success of "We Gotta Get You a Woman". While initial reviews of
Ballad were mixed, it came to be regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of the era.
Something/Anything? In late 1971, Rundgren was recruited to finish
Badfinger's third album
Straight Up, a project
George Harrison had abandoned to organize the
Concert for Bangladesh, in London. The album was a hit and its two singles were similarly successful, although Rundgren was not credited for the first ("
Day After Day") and thus did not receive production royalties for that single. Rundgren said that the song "didn't sound much like what [Harrison had] done" and speculated that the credit to Harrison "may or may not have been something purposeful, just some by-product of a general Beatle hubris". The
Straight Up sessions lasted two weeks in September, after which Rundgren returned to Los Angeles to work on his third solo album, originally planned as a single LP. As with
Ballad, much of the newer material was written or conceived under the influence of marijuana. However, by this time, he had also begun experimenting with
Ritalin. He recalled, "my songwriting process had become almost too second-nature. I was writing songs formulaically, almost without thinking, knocking [them out], reflexively, in about 20 minutes." The use of Ritalin also helped him focus on the process as he worked up to 12 hours a day to beat the three-week deadline. To keep up the pace, he installed an eight-track recorder, mixer, and synthesizers into his living room so that he could continue recording after leaving the studio. For the first time in his career, Rundgren recorded every part by himself, including bass, drums, and vocals. About "an album and a half" was completed this way. He then decided to stretch the project into a double LP and quickly recorded the last few tracks with musicians, live in the studio.
Something/Anything?, the first album officially issued under the name "Todd Rundgren", was released in February 1972, shortly after Bearsville had signed a long-term distribution deal with
Warner Bros. Records. The album included many songs that would become his best-known. Included among straightforward pop songs are extended
jams and studio banter, such as the spoken-word track "Intro", in which he teaches the listener about
recording flaws for an
egg hunt-type game he calls "Sounds of the Studio". The album peaked at number 29 on the
Billboard 200 and was certified
gold in three years. Lead single "
I Saw the Light" peaked at number 16 on the
Billboard Hot 100. "Hello It's Me", which followed late in 1973, reached number 5. "Couldn't I Just Tell You" was influential to artists in the
power pop genre. Music journalist
Paul Lester called the recording a "masterclass in
compression" and said that Rundgren "staked his claim to powerpop immortality [and] set the whole ball rolling". Musician
Scott Miller's 2010 book
Music: What Happened? calls the song "likely the greatest power pop recording ever made", with lyrics "somehow both desperate and lighthearted at the same time", and a guitar solo having "truly amazing dexterity and inflection". In 2003,
Something/Anything? was ranked number 173 on
Rolling Stone magazine's list of the
"500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
A Wizard, a True Star, Todd, and Utopia in 1978 , whose
1973 debut album was produced by Rundgren Subsequent albums, beginning with
A Wizard, a True Star and the spin-off group
Utopia, saw a dramatic shift away from straightforward three-minute pop. After the success of
Something/Anything?, Rundgren felt uncomfortable that he was being increasingly tagged as "the male
Carole King". "With all due respect to Carole King," he said, "It wasn't what I was hoping to create as a musical legacy for myself." Now relocated back to New York and experimenting with a host of
psychedelic drugs, he began to think that the writing on
Something/Anything? was largely formulaic and borne from laziness, and sought to create a "more eclectic and more experimental" follow-up album. His music tastes also started to lean toward the
progressive rock of
Frank Zappa,
Yes, and the
Mahavishnu Orchestra. In 2017, while giving a commencement speech at the
Berklee College of Music, he described the record as: The sound and structure of
Wizard was heavily informed by Rundgren's hallucinogenic experiences. It was envisioned as a hallucinogenic-inspired "flight plan" with all the tracks segueing seamlessly into each other, starting with a "chaotic" mood and ending with a medley of his favorite soul songs. He said: "With drugs I could suddenly abstract my thought processes in a certain way, and I wanted to see if I could put them on a record. A lot of people recognized it as the dynamics of a psychedelic trip—it was almost like painting with your head." Although critical reception to the album was mixed,
Wizard became highly influential to musicians in the ensuing decades. In 2003, music journalist
Barney Hoskyns called the record "the greatest album of all time ... a dizzying, intoxicating rollercoaster ride of emotions and genre mutations [that] still sounds more bravely futuristic than any ostensibly cutting-edge electro-pop being made in the 21st Century." In 2018,
Pitchforks Sam Sodomsky wrote that the "fingerprints" of
Wizard remained "evident on
bedroom auteurs to this day". In September, the magazine published Lennon's response, in which he denied the charges and referred to the musician as "Turd Runtgreen": "I have never claimed to be a revolutionary. But I am allowed to sing about anything I want! Right?" Later, Rundgren said, "John and I realized we were being used and I got a phone call from him one day and we just said: 'Let's drop this now.'" Released in May 1976,
Faithful saw Rundgren celebrating his tenth year as a professional musician. The album featured one side of original songs and one side of covers of significant songs from 1966, including the Yardbirds' "
Happenings Ten Years Time Ago",
the Beach Boys' "
Good Vibrations", and two Lennon-penned Beatles songs. The arrangements of the covers were intended to sound as close to the originals as possible, and Rundgren's original songs were written as a reflection of his 1960s influences. He cited the song "The Verb 'To Love'" as the point in which he made the conscious decision to stop writing superficial love songs and "seek out all other kinds of subject matter to write about". Despite the lack of sales and promotion for
Faithful, lead single "Good Vibrations" received regular airplay on American radio. Following the completion of
Faithful, Rundgren spent two months on an eastern spiritual retreat, visiting Iran, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bali, Thailand, Japan, and Hawaii. He also opened Utopia Sound Studios in
Lake Hill, New York, just outside of Woodstock, and bought a home nearby, as well as an adjoining property to be taken over as accommodation for artists who used the studio. The Lake Hill complex on Mink Hollow Road remained Rundgren's base for the next six years. In the interim until his next solo effort, he recorded three albums with Utopia. The first,
Disco Jets, was a tongue-in-cheek collection of instrumental
disco tracks left unreleased until 2001.
Ra (February 1977) was a concept album based on Egyptian mythology, which prefaced a lavish tour involving an extravagant stage set with a giant pyramid and
Sphynx head.
Oops! Wrong Planet (September 1977), recorded immediately after the tour, signaled the start of a more pop-oriented direction for the group. By late 1977, Rundgren was in the midst of separating from then-girlfriend
Bebe Buell and their infant daughter
Liv Tyler. Rundgren recalled leaving his home in New York City and sequestering himself at Mink Hollow, "after I discovered that I didn't want to cohabit any longer with Bebe, in any sense of the word ... A fortunate by-product of being so out of everything all the time and always being the odd man out ... is that you have plenty of time for self-examination." He intended the songs on his next solo album to be performed on piano with minimal arrangements, apart from the bass, drums and voices. In that sense, he stated that the songwriting process appeared to be "fairly conventional".
Hermit of Mink Hollow was released in May 1978. Popularly viewed as his most immediately accessible work since
Something/Anything?, it received more public attention and radio airplay than most of Rundgren's efforts since
A Wizard, a True Star and was heralded as a "return to form" after the string of prog records with Utopia. In the US, the LP peaked at number 36, while single "
Can We Still Be Friends" reached number 29. The song became Rundgren's most-covered, with versions by
Robert Palmer,
Rod Stewart,
Colin Blunstone, and
Mandy Moore. To promote the work, Rundgren undertook an American tour playing at smaller venues including
The Bottom Line in New York and
The Roxy in Los Angeles. These shows resulted in the double live album
Back to the Bars, which featured a mixture of material from his solo work and Utopia, performed with backing musicians including Utopia,
Spencer Davis,
Daryl Hall and
John Oates and
Stevie Nicks. In 1980, Utopia recorded a Beatles parody album in the form of
Deface the Music. It included "Everybody Else Is Wrong", another song perceived to have been aimed at Lennon. Later that year, Lennon was killed by
Mark David Chapman, an obsessive Rundgren fan who was incensed by Lennon's remarks on religion. When he was apprehended, Chapman was wearing a promotional T-shirt for
Hermit of Mink Hollow and had left a copy of
Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren in his hotel room. Rundgren was not aware of the connections until "way after the fact".
Healing and Tortured Artist Effect The year 1981 saw the album-long concept work
Healing. He is also the co-developer of the computer
screensaver system
Flowfazer. During this period, Rundgren's Mink Hollow home was robbed. He and his girlfriend were tied up in the home by the robbers as part of the crime. The
new wave-tinged
The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect (1982) included a cover of the
Small Faces' hit "
Tin Soldier". "
Bang the Drum All Day", an album single, was a minor chart hit. It later became more prominent and was adopted as an unofficial theme by several professional sports franchises, notably the
Green Bay Packers. Disc Jockey Geno Michellini of KLOS in Los Angeles used "Bang the Drum All Day" as an unofficial kick-off to the weekend on Friday afternoons. "Bang the Drum All Day" was also featured in a
Carnival Cruise television advertising campaign. It is now considered one of Rundgren's most popular songs.
Tortured Artist marked the end of Rundgren's tenure with Bearsville Records.
1980s–1990s: A Cappella, Nearly Human, and 2nd Wind Rundgren signed with
Warner Bros. Records, who issued his next album,
A Cappella (1985), which was recorded using Rundgren's multi-tracked voice, accompanied by arrangements constructed entirely from programmed vocal samples. Rundgren scored four episodes of the popular children's television show ''
Pee-wee's Playhouse'' in 1986.
Nearly Human (1989) and
2nd Wind (1991) were both recorded live—the former in the studio, the latter in a theater before a live audience, who were instructed to remain silent. Each song on these albums was recorded as a complete single take with no later
overdubbing. Both albums marked, in part, a return to his
Philly soul roots.
2nd Wind also included several excerpts from Rundgren's musical
Up Against It, which was adapted from the screenplay (originally titled "Prick Up Your Ears"), that British playwright
Joe Orton had originally offered to
the Beatles for their never-made follow-up to the film
Help! (1965). In 1989, Rundgren hit the road with
Nearly Human—2nd Wind band, which included brass and a trio of
backup singers (one of whom, Michele Gray, Rundgren married). He also toured during 1992 with
Ringo Starr's second
All-Starr band. A brief 1992 tour of Japan reunited the Rundgren/Powell/Sulton/Wilcox lineup, and ''
Redux '92: Live in Japan'' was released on Rhino Records.
1990s–2000s: TR-I, PatroNet, and Liars The mid-1990s saw Rundgren recording under the pseudonym TR-i ("Todd Rundgren interactive") for two albums. The first of these, 1993's
No World Order, consisted of hundreds of seconds-long snippets of music, that could be combined in various ways to suit the listener. Initially targeted for the
Philips CD-i platform,
No World Order featured interactive controls for tempo, mood, and other parameters, along with pre-programmed mixes by Rundgren himself,
Bob Clearmountain,
Don Was and
Jerry Harrison. The disc was also released for
PC and
Macintosh and in two versions on standard
audio CD, the continuous mix disc
No World Order and, later, the more song-oriented
No World Order Lite. The music itself was quite a departure from Rundgren's previous work, with a dance/
techno feel and much
rapping by Rundgren. The follow-up,
The Individualist (1995), featured interactive video content, that could be viewed or in one case, played; it was a simple video game along with the music, which was more rock-oriented than
No World Order. In 1994, Rundgren composed the film score for the comedy film
Dumb and Dumber, and contributed the song "
Can We Still Be Friends?" to the soundtrack. Rundgren returned to recording under his own name for
With a Twist... (1997), an album of
bossa-nova covers of his older material. His PatroNet work, which trickled out to subscribers over more than a year, was released in 2000 as
One Long Year. In 2004, Rundgren released
Liars, a concept album about "paucity of truth", that features a mixture of his older and newer sounds. As the Internet gained mass acceptance, Rundgren, along with longtime manager Eric Gardner and Apple digital music exec Kelli Richards, started PatroNet, which offered fans (patrons) access to his works-in-progress and new unreleased tracks in exchange for a subscription fee, cutting out record labels. The songs from Rundgren's first PatroNet run were later released as the album
One Long Year (2000). Since then, Rundgren has severed his connections with major record labels and continues to offer new music direct to subscribers via his website, although he also continues to record and release CDs through independent labels. As of 2022, the PatroNet.com website was not active.
2000s–2010s in
Toronto, September 2006 in 2019 In the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks, Rundgren created the score for the film
A Face to a Name, directed by
Douglas Sloan. The film depicted numerous photographs of missing New Yorkers that were displayed on Bellevue Hospital's 'wall of prayers' following the attacks. The film was part of a special screening at the
Woodstock Film Festival in 2002. In late 2005, the
Boston-based band
the Cars were planning to re-form despite bassist
Benjamin Orr's death and lack of interest on the part of former lead singer
Ric Ocasek. Rumors followed that Rundgren had joined
Elliot Easton and
Greg Hawkes in rehearsals for a possible new Cars lineup. Initial speculation pointed to
the New Cars being fleshed out with
Clem Burke of
Blondie and
Art Alexakis of
Everclear. Eventually the group completed their lineup with former Rundgren bassist Kasim Sulton and studio drummer
Prairie Prince of
the Tubes, who had played on
XTC's Rundgren-produced
Skylarking (1986) and who has recorded and toured with Rundgren. In early 2006, the new lineup played a few private shows for industry professionals, played live on
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and made other media appearances before commencing a 2006 summer tour with the re-formed
Blondie. Rundgren referred to the project as "an opportunity ... for me to pay my bills, play to a larger audience, work with musicians I know and like, and ideally have some fun for a year." The New Cars' first single, "Not Tonight", was released on March 20, 2006. A live album/greatest hits collection, ''
The New Cars: It's Alive'', was released in June 2006. The album includes classic Cars songs (and two Rundgren hits) recorded live plus three new studio tracks ("Not Tonight", "Warm", and "More") In April 2011, ''
Todd Rundgren's Johnson, a collection of Robert Johnson covers, which had been recorded more than a year earlier, was released. In another 2011, an album of covers, (re)Production'', features Rundgren performing tracks he had previously produced for other acts, including
Grand Funk Railroad's "
Walk Like a Man" and
XTC's "Dear God". In 2017, Rundgren released
White Knight, which features collaborations with
Trent Reznor,
Robyn,
Daryl Hall,
Joe Walsh and
Donald Fagen. In December 2018, Cleopatra Press published his self-penned memoir,
The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams, and Dissertations. The book contains 181 chapters, each one page long, and each consisting of three paragraphs. He said that "I realized that I have to do this or somebody else will do it. I'm getting to the point where I could at some point not be able to do it myself, and then someone else would do it and I wouldn't be happy with the result." Rundgren toured in late 2019 with
Micky Dolenz,
Jason Scheff,
Christopher Cross and
Joey Molland of
Badfinger in celebration of the Beatles'
self-titled 1968 album on the "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today – A Tribute to the Beatles' White Album".
2020s Rundgren collaborated with
Weezer frontman
Rivers Cuomo in 2020, releasing the single "Down with the Ship". In December, he released his English translation of the 1978 song "
Flappie", originally by Dutch comedian
Youp van 't Hek. That April, he reunited with
Sparks 50 years after producing their debut album, releasing a single "Your Fandango". In September 2022, he released the album
Space Force. He provided additional vocals along with the
Sunday Service Choir, on the track "My Soul", by
hip hop superduo
¥$, from their album
Vultures 2, released on 3 August 2024. ==Style and recognition==