Music is the religious belief system of Todd Rundgren.
The rock legend views his current tour as somewhat of a sermon. Not your traditional Sunday sermon, not about “sin or going to heaven or hell,” but about survival. As the world around us shifts — specifically in this past year, Rundgren notes — he feels his performances consequently must shift alongside it.
Rundgren employs his music to ponder a question heavy on the minds of many: How do we survive these times?
“I’ve gone to another place in my head, and I’m trying to invite my audience to join me in that place,” he explains. “It’s a survival mechanism, in a way. How do we get through this?”
Rundgren is no stranger to adapting to the times. The legendary musician, songwriter and producer has a career about as eclectic and adventurous as it gets. While he now primarily performs as a solo artist, he has decades upon decades of experience working with bands (notably the psychedelic 1960s band Nazz or pioneering progressive-rock band Utopia). Rundgren originally did not see a home for himself in the spotlight. With an initial dream of becoming a guitar player, Rundgren eventually transitioned into an undeniable frontman as his career progressed.
Rundgren acknowledges his most commercial, chart-topping success — “that bang the drum song,” which has become somewhat of a sports anthem and favorite of Carnival Cruise Lines’ advertisements — but finds more excitement in developing his set from more obscure pockets of his discography, with songs forming a narrative arc for his shows to follow.
“It’s satisfying for me, particularly if I’m doing my own stuff, because I can fully inhabit the song,” he explains. “If you have something to say, you know you’re not just singing a damned song, you know you have something that you want to convey to the audience. It’s like you’re having a conversation. That’s part of why I enjoy it.”
Rundgren has also acted as a prominent trailblazer for technological innovation and interactive art within the music industry, notably with his 1993 LP No World Order, the world’s first interactive album. Listeners could alter the tempo, speed and form of the record through a specially formatted CD player (something you sadly can’ t make use of with a circa-2025 MacBook).
Even to this day, Rundgren remains incredibly tech-savvy, an indispensable skill that has left a lot of his musical peers in the dust.
Rundgren says he’s producing music nowadays “the same way the kids are doing it” — with a tricked-out laptop and an audio interface.
“People are figuring it out themselves now, they have accessibility to the tools,” he says. “I think that’s great. It’s liberating for people. There was always probably great music that never got recorded because the artist couldn’t afford it or because they couldn’t get signed by a label. Now I think we have a broader variety of music.”
While this age of technology has made the process of music-making much more accessible to up-and-coming artists, Rundgren notes the downside that an internet-only existence can have on developing musicians and the importance of bringing music into physical spaces to be heard live.
“I’ve always felt that a musician’s job is to go out and play music. It’s not to simply sit in your bedroom and make music or be in the studio all the time making music. It’s bringing it out to people and actually giving yourself the benefit of the performance. … Recorded music has its limitations in terms of its effectiveness,” Rundgren explains.
“I worked briefly with Janis Joplin shortly before her death and discovered that she didn’t like to make records because there was no audience,” Rundgren adds. “There was no interplay, you know, being in the studio, she didn’t know if it was working because there was nobody reacting to what she was doing. She would rather have played in front of an audience. As a matter of fact, her very first record with Big Brother and the Holding Company was live.”
Rundgren says that although he is apprehensive writing about specific current events, solely due to the fact that as time goes on, relevance wanes. Rundgren seeks out the universal principle of what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in his mind, and then forms the theming for his shows around these intersections. Through this practice, his sermon is formed, and his hymns are sung.
“It’s that old thing, two people in a museum looking at a painting, one of them says, ‘Oh, that’s art.’ And the other one says, ‘That’s not art!’ But rarely do you have an audience, a musical audience, that hasn’t gotten into some sort of sync with the performance,” Rundgren says. “It’s the fact that you’re unreeling the message in real time. I always hope to change people in a way with the material. Not everyone believes that about music, but I’ve always believed that it has a certain kind of power that other arts don’t have.”
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This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2025.