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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Todd Rundgren

Trying

Adapt

Business

" 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. "

" We bought property after Iniki in '92. I figured we'd never find better bargains. As it turned out, we didn't get a bargain, but we did find the spot we wanted to live on. It actually took a couple years to secure that spot. Then, after we moved, it took over 10 years to start construction on the house. It's still a work in progress. "

" 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. "

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

Todd Rundgren

Start

Acting

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Kids don't want to dye their whole head another color; that's what their mothers do. "

" 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. "

" I really consider myself fortunate to have been of age during the musical revolution that came in the form of the Beatles. People don't realize that previous to the Beatles, there really was no such thing as an album artist. People made singles. Then they would put a bunch of those singles together and call it an album. And that was it. "

" 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. "

" I figure it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if I make a successful arena rock record, I'll wind up playing arenas! I wouldn't mind being back in that kind of venue because of the kinds of things you can do with production. You can make your shows more interesting, which would be fun to do. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 am a laptop boy. People say: 'Where's your studio?' I say: 'It's in my laptop, in my rucksack.' "

" I first started doing some somewhat technology-based shows in the '80s. If you wanted to get real technical about it, back in the '70s I used to open up with Utopia with just me on the stage with a four-track tape recorder. So, technically, I've been using the help of various devices pretty much throughout my career. "

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

" 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. "

Todd Rundgren

Want

Music

" 'Something/Anything?' was kind of a different record, since I'm playing everything myself. A lot of the songs on there have a particular kind of instrumentation that is much like a guitar quartet, and in some ways, it's an exceptional song on that record because so much of the writing on 'Something/Anything?' is piano-oriented. "

" 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. "

" In a way, I created Utopia as a platform for me to become more of a guitar player and less of the kind of balladeer that people were taking me for. "

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

Todd Rundgren

God

Love

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "