The Legendary Todd Rundgren On Tour…

Following three incredible sold out shows earlier last year, one of music’s most revered singer songwriter guitarists and producers, Todd Rundgren, will return to Australia this week playing a string of headline shows. The tour will commence in Melbourne, March 6 at the Corner Hotel, followed by Adelaide’s Lion Arts Factory on March 7, Theatre Royal Castlemaine on March 8, Brisbane’s The Triffid on March 13 and concluding in Sydney with Factory Theatre on March 14 and The Lounge, Chatswood on March 15. The legendary Todd Rundgren talks to Hi Fi Way about this tour.

It’s fantastic that you’re coming back to Australia this March. You must be really excited about, returning so soon again?
I am, you know, we were making some progress before COVID, and then of course we couldn’t, we were going to be making some regular visits there and then Covid put an end to that. But we did get back last year and now we’re hoping to make this at least a yearly thing.

Is Australia your favourite place to tour?
Australia has always been one of my favourite places. I never got to the country in my heyday as it were for some reason or another. But the first time I got there was in the nineties, and it was just a publicity tour. I did a few things in Sydney and then got to explore the country and went up to Port Douglas, checked out the reef. We went to Alice Springs and Uluru and got to see some of those things that even now you can’t experience, you can’t climb at Uluru anymore. So, we did that, and we’ll always have great memories of that, but now I’m able to work there and I’ve been there with been there with Ringo as well. So, that was always a way to get into the country and be able to not necessarily be a local, but you know, the more times you go, you have favourite places to visit, things like that. Now I don’t feel like such a stranger when I come.

With a career where you’ve done so many awesome things, what are you focusing on in particular on this tour? Is there a particular album or albums that you’re leaning on?
Well, we’re doing a variation of the tour that I finished last year in the US. It’s more of a, uh, more of a deep dive in some material that I don’t often do, but the more devoted fans will be familiar with, not doing anything too particularly arcane. We’re keeping with a lot of the stuff that I think older fans are familiar with, but it covers pretty much the whole range of, it doesn’t have maybe the very latest stuff in it, which is a little bit more techno some of it, but band appropriate. A lot of it is my favourite songs and deep cuts that I know the fans would like to hear.

How hard is it to condense an entire career down to ninety minutes or so?
It’s always a challenge when you’re not promoting a specific record. If I had a new record out, I would build a show around that. There would be, of course, other material, but that would be a theme that would run through it and the show doesn’t necessarily have that kind of thematic element. The songs are from all different eras and all different styles in some cases. So, there isn’t that sort of thread that would necessarily tie it together, but I think that makes the show in some ways more interesting. We’ve tried to play to a certain degree, to audience expectations, the stuff that they would most like to hear, and in some cases what the band would most like to play, but this time we’re going to delve a little bit deeper and not make any sort of assumptions about what the audience wants to hear. It’s more about what I want to play.

Davey Lane is also on this tour and that relationship seems to be building and getting stronger?
I know, I’m very, very lucky to have him helping me out with these things. He’s kind of like co-promoter almost in that he’s so involved in the whole logistics of the tour. He’s done a lot to help me build an audience in the country, or at least the part of the country that we tour, down there in that part of the country. Eventually, we’ll expand. That’s the difficult part about touring Australia that you need to make a commitment to great distances because everything’s so far apart and we don’t usually have the time for that. The longer you’re there, the more it costs to be there. So, we try and compress the touring down to as economical and as practical a routing as we can come up with. That usually constrains us down to the southeast corner of the country.

I was playing Something/Anything the other night, that’s an absolute incredible album. When you prepare for a tour like this do you have to go back and listen to a lot of your previous albums to prepare?
Well, when we first put together the show that I’ll be bringing an abbreviated version when we do it in the States is a two hour plus show with a whole lot of production. We put in quite a bit of rehearsal to learn new stuff and relearn old stuff. I do have a steady group of musicians that I work with in the US, but the travel costs alone of bringing them to Australia are prohibitive. We would be losing money in that sense. So that’s the reason why Davey is such a godsend in these situations. He makes it affordable for me to do it, not just simply the musical contribution so that it’s possible to do.

Is there a new album on the cards anytime soon?
I am in the process of launching essentially a subscription service, and that’s taken up a lot of my time. It’s called GlobalNation™, then you can find out about it at globalnation.tv. It’s essentially starting a new corporation. It is a big project and it’s taken up a lot of my time that I expected to be devoting to writing new material. The process mostly takes place in here anyway, when I get to the actual recording part of it, it doesn’t take a long time and the writing doesn’t take a long time if I’ve properly ruminated on it first. So, things are starting, my plate is getting a little less full, and that leaves room for me to start working on new material, and it is altogether possible.

Musically, is there anywhere left unexplored that you really want to venture down when you sort of think about a new album?
I did an album called State, and that was an album where I thought, I’ve always played around with synthesizers and experimenting with that, and the whole drum bass thing was really big and Skrillex was doing festivals and stuff, and so that was a self-conscious attempt to absorb some new influences and experiment with sounds in a different way, so that had a some underlying concept to it. I utilised some of what I learned when I did White Knight, which was a collaborative album. The basic underpinning of that was to have every song be, or most every song have the contributions of someone else in them, because as the music business has evolved, it’s harder and harder to build audience in the traditional way.

Collaboration are a great way to expose yourself to someone else’s audience and for them to get exposed to yours. That was a whole different concept, but it wasn’t necessarily a stylistic one. What I’m thinking about now is not necessarily stylistic either, but it is conceptual. It’ll be more like Liars in which, every song had a different style to it, but there was a lyrical and philosophical thread that went through the entire record. This new record, I am thinking in those terms, which is kind of a challenge in an era when people don’t think in terms of albums in the way that they used to. People will be leaking songs out all the time, and then sometimes it’s almost like the olden days when you release singles and then you had enough of them to put an album out. I’m not yet, not sure whether I will attempt to do things like release so-called singles on the internet, or whether I just might try and satisfy the needs of my own audience and they’ll give me the support I need to continue to make more stuff.

Do you still believe in the concept of an album, particularly with Spotify and things like that which dominate the way people consume music now?
Yeah, well, it seems people have lost any attention span past three minutes, so you wonder whether it’s worth the effort to try and do something larger and conceptual. I’ve still tended to think in those terms, and if nothing else, you could always turn it into a musical later! Musicals are conceptual and they’re long form, the material usually has some relationship. Song usually have some relationship to each other, to some theme, and they can be different styles of music as you go along. So, I tend to think in those terms. You’re building a little story in your head anyway, and you’re just writing the soundtrack to a story in your head. Just depends how big that story is. Can it sustain an hour? Liars was an eighty minute long project, it really pushed the boundaries of what could fit on a CD. But of course, now, there are no CDs anymore!

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Todd Rundgren on tour on the following dates, tickets HERE…