Rundgren Still Banging the Drum for Meaningful Music
Photo by Tom Callan
By Mike Saucier
When Todd Rundgren comes to Phoenix on tour he relies on his drummer to show him around. Prairie Prince, who has worked with Rundgren for years, grew up in the Valley of the Sun before moving to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute on scholarship.
Prince, who has played with The Tubes (Phoenix-born) for decades, started Journey with Neil Schon and Gregg Rolie.
“Whenever we get to Phoenix I kind of depend on Prairie to kind of find us whatever it is we need,” Rundgren told Frontdoors. “I think in the last couple years we were there on the 4th of July and Prairie took us out to a place near his old high school to watch fireworks. It’s good to have somebody with connections there.”
Rundgren will play Celebrity Theatre on August 25 as part of YESTIVAL with Yes, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, and Carl Palmer.
Rundgren is supporting his new record, “White Knights,” which is a series of collaborations with artists such as Joe Walsh, Trent Reznor and Daryl Hall.
The singer, songwriter and producer, whose songs “Hello It’s Me”, “I Saw the Light” and “Bang the Drum All Day” are staples of classic rock radio, believes a hit song has to be both simple and contain meaningful lyrics.
“I think a lot of times people don’t work too hard on their lyrics,” Rundgren said. “I always like to hear some kind of poetry in the lyrics of the song. So it’s great to have what they call a hook, a thing that’s easy to remember and that people like to sing along to. I always look for an interesting lyric, some kind of idea there. Great songs sometimes are very simple. They don’t have to be too deep or too elaborate.”
“After all, we’ve been rerecording ‘Louie Louie’ in one form or another for years and years,” he continued. “A lot of hit records are based on the same sort of formula. So it’s knowing where that sweet spot is between what’s substantial and has actual meaning to it and keeping it simple enough to be able to have people latch on to it.”
He likes to play his popular songs but said that hit records can be “kind of an albatross.”
“The audience will kind of endure everything else you play waiting for you to play that one particular song,” he said. “So while I enjoy playing the more familiar stuff, because people certainly respond to it, I get off on playing something a little more obscure. I enjoy playing a song like ‘Buffalo Grass,’ which was never a single, never a hit record, but I like the form of the song and I like to play guitar on it. The audience, even if they’re not familiar with it, seems to fall for the song. I sort of enjoy it.”
Rundgren said his critics often wonder why he didn’t write more hit songs. He said the songs he writes have a purpose, a meaning. He’s not just cranking out material for the sake of it.
“At this point it’s difficult for me to sit down and write a song that doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “It has to be coming out of some kind of thing that I’m pondering, something that bothers me, something I wonder about and that’s pretty much guided me since the earliest days.”
When he’s not preparing for a show, Rundgren is dedicating his energies toward his Spirit of Harmony Foundation, which advocates for music education in schools.
Though he said he is new to the idea of advocacy and nonprofits, he said the foundation has resonated with a lot of fans.
“People my age remember getting some kind of music education when they were young,” he said. “They would still consider it important when we were kids. They had a program where they would come around to the schools and you could rent an instrument every week. There has been a lot of research recently that shows if you get music education when you’re really young and your brain is still developing, it changes the how you process sound for the rest of your life, even if you don’t go on to become a musician, and is a benefit that affects the way you learn.”
In 2015, the Foundation began development of a database that helps match the needs of music programs with resources. For info: spiritofharmony.org.
