Todd Rundgren
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.Collection: Easter
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.Collection: Attitude
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.
On occasion, I hear a rearrangement of a song that really makes me reevaluate it in a way.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once I go on stage, the atmosphere is totally theatrical. The greater the illusion, the greater the intensity of the excitement it creates.
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.
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.
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.
Kids don't want to dye their whole head another color; that's what their mothers do.
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.
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.
People have always said that I could have been a highly successful pop artist, if only that were my intention. It never was. My original intention was to be a kind of behind-the-scenes participant in music, to just be a record producer and engineer. And I made a record for myself just so I could have an outlet for my musical ideas.
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.
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.
My father was not really into popular music; I had to learn about that for myself.
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.
I decided early on that I wanted to be Michael Bloomfield, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton - not George Harrison.
I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.
The God that can only love something like this man. And from then on it was all downhill.
You do have a modicum of peace of mind here, but it's as unsettled as any other place.
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.
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.
I never thought a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland or anywhere else was a good idea.
Behind every tree there's a new monster.
That's what I like about Frank Ocean or Bon Iver - they try to capture a feeling in the most sincere way.
There's only one band that could ever even pretend to assume the mantle of what the Beatles did, who have been so pre-eminent and world-dominating that they could effect a paradigm shift in the culture, who have been willing to leverage their success into musical change, and that is U2 - regardless of what the result of that is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it's possible, and invest their whole selves in that.
So I don't think I'm gonna pull my head into my shell just because a bunch of people start acting like idiots.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem turned out to be that I never was that kind of an artist.
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.
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.