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Music legend Todd Rundgren to perform at The Lensic
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Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Todd Rundgren is hard to pin down. His wide-ranging career has spanned psychedelia, art rock, pop, progressive rock, electronic music and more.
“I’ve always tried to avoid the well-traveled path and do what others wouldn’t or couldn’t do,” Rundgren said.
As part of his 2025 “Still Me (Still We)” tour, Rundgren and a five-piece backing band will play The Lensic in Santa Fe on Tuesday, Nov. 11.
“We’ve been playing a combination of fan favorites and deep-dive rarities, strung together into a kind of narrative,” he said.
While many fans know Rundgren for such hits as “We Gotta Get You a Woman” (1970), “Hello, It’s Me” (1972) and “Bang the Drum All Day” (1983), others revere him as a glam rock pioneer and intrepid experimentalist. Over the years, Rundgren has also produced albums by artists as diverse as The Psychedelic Furs, Hall and Oates, Cheap Trick and the Patti Smith Group.
“After ‘Something/Anything?’ (Rundgren’s third solo album, from 1972), I realized that I had fallen into the habit of writing from a kind of standard formula, romantic plaints with a typical song structure,” Rundgren said. “There were other musical ideas and sounds that were in my head that I was ignoring. And since I was making a living producing records for other artists, I had the freedom to follow that muse.”
The result was “A Wizard, a True Star” (1973), a critically-acclaimed psychedelic album, which he produced and performed almost entirely on his own, influencing subsequent generations of so-called bedroom musicians. That album also marked the artist’s first foray into psychedelic drugs, which he arrived at later than some of his musical peers but used just as liberally.
“Back in the ’70s, someone sent me a shoebox full of peyote buttons,” he said. “I was mescalinated continuously for a whole month.”
Rundgren’s musical adventurousness has not always been appreciated by record industry executives, whose single-minded interest in commercial viability he likens to a “sword of Damocles (that) never goes away.”
“There’s always pressure from somewhere to just stick with the familiar and accede to so-called audience expectations,” he said. “It’s as if the struggle to be an artist is perceived as an act of spiteful indulgence.
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“I don’t like to disappoint anyone, but I got this far just trying to be myself and it’s a little late to change now,” he added.
Rundgren has also questioned the wisdom of trying to predict audience tastes.
“Doesn’t seem any point to trying to figure out what the popular meme is, since that’s going to change unpredictably anyway,” he said.
In the past decade, Rundgren has collaborated with a range of musicians, including Trent Reznor, Sparks, The Roots and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who lent their talents to Rundgren’s albums “White Knight” (2017) and “Space Force” (2022).
“Collaboration has taken on a different meaning since the advent of file sharing. You often never meet your partners face to face,” Rundgren said. “The only time I was in the same room with a collaborator (on those albums) was recording ‘Tin Foil Hat’ with Donald Fagen (for ‘White Knight’), and that was because he happened to be on Kauai at the time.”
Rundgren, who was born in Pennsylvania, has lived on Kauai, Hawaii, since the mid-1990s.
Political themes sometimes crop up in Rundgren’s music, and on one occasion, he even lent his artistry to a political campaign.
“I became friends with Ian Hunter (lead singer of Mott the Hoople), and we did a tour in 1979 in support of independent presidential candidate John Anderson,” he said.
But in the intervening years, Rundgren has grown more cynical about the potential for music to change society.
“I grew up when music became a form of protest, but that was long before the internet,” he said. “Now we’ve fallen into a sort of fast-food mentality where all culture is consumed in mass quantities, and no one stops to actually taste the flavor of it. It was never a substitute for responsible citizenry, a concept that seems completely foreign in these days of rampant consumerism.”
Rundgren still believes music can help people connect on a smaller scale, though, and such connections are the theme of his “Still Me (Still We)” tour.
“It’s about the things we have in common,” he said, “and how we need to remind ourselves of that commonality.”
