Top 50 Todd Rundgren Quotes

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.

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.

I’ve become kind of a haven for people who like pop music, but that’s not the only thing they like. They also like music in general and want to be able to expand their own horizons. They haven’t completely given up on music and are willing to have somebody mediate new things that are happening in music to them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era when radio was less formatted. It was really special. You could hear a jazz song then a pop song then a show tune then some jazz. Basically, whatever the DJ felt like playing, he would play. He was educating you and exposing you to things you would never hear otherwise.

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.

That’s what I like about Frank Ocean or Bon Iver – they try to capture a feeling in the most sincere way.

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

When I got out of high school, I was in a blues band. It was the kind of music I was interested in, and listening to, mostly because it was becoming a vehicle for a generation of guitarists – like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Mike Bloomfield. And that’s what I wanted to be, principally: a guitar player.

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

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.

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.

I think there are always people who, when they get the bug to play an instrument, they want to get as good as they can with it rather than just be simply adequate at it. You run into them every once in a while – some kid who wants to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan, for whatever reason, and plays exactly like him.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the Beatles first came out, you had to go to a certain amount of trouble to have long hair. You just couldn’t have it immediately. Anything you can just go out and get – like platform shoes – is not going to inspire people as much as something they have to go through a little bit of hell to have.

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.

‘State’ can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb – it’s kind of why I chose that title. It’s not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to.

When I got out of high school, I joined a local blues band in Philadelphia – Woody’s Truck Stop.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All it takes to become president is money and a certain kind of power. Being president is the first thing I can shoot for, not the highest. It may come to a point where people take rock and roll musicians more seriously than they take politicians. It may eventually turn out that musicians have more credibility.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.