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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Todd Rundgren Quotes

Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.

– Todd Rundgren

So there was a way for you to get promoted and survive as an artist without worrying about AM radio hits.

– Todd Rundgren

There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.

– Todd Rundgren

It would be really great if someone would invent a new Internet with the specific purpose of not making money off of it, but making it what it originally was, a free marketplace of ideas, and there are still aspects of the Internet that are that. Wikipedia, essentially, is still the bastion of the original ideals of the Internet.

– Todd Rundgren

While I used to make my living principally as a record producer, as time went on, I had to depend more and more on my live performances because of the evolution of the record industry, which has de-emphasized what made it possible to make a living.

– Todd Rundgren

I used to have sort of mixed feelings about a producer whose only skills seemed to be going into the studio, schmoozing the artists and making them feel good. I can see now that in some cases, that’s what you have to do because that’s the only way you’re going to get them to produce.

– Todd Rundgren

If bearing a reputation as a weirdo is all it takes to be a genius, I’m a shoo-in. Come to think of it, half the people I know are geniuses – the other half, peculiarly enough, idiots.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

When the Beatles first came out, you had to go to a certain amount of trouble to have long hair. You just couldn’t have it immediately. Anything you can just go out and get – like platform shoes – is not going to inspire people as much as something they have to go through a little bit of hell to have.

– Todd Rundgren

I want to be known as a professional weirdo. There aren’t many Salvador Dalis or Buckminster Fullers left. If I become popular enough, I can establish the next step for records.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

The Toddstock thing is the closest thing, I have to say, a Grateful Dead sort of thing where it all lapses over from the formality of a concert into more of a lifestyle thing.

– Todd Rundgren

‘State’ can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb – it’s kind of why I chose that title. It’s not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to.

– Todd Rundgren

There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it’s possible, and invest their whole selves in that.

– Todd Rundgren

The New York Dolls did not think of themselves as punk rock. There was no such term at the time. They were just another band in what was called the New York scene.

– Todd Rundgren

I’ve always done very ‘composed’ music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it’s fun not knowing where you’re going.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

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

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

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

All it takes to become president is money and a certain kind of power. Being president is the first thing I can shoot for, not the highest. It may come to a point where people take rock and roll musicians more seriously than they take politicians. It may eventually turn out that musicians have more credibility.

– Todd Rundgren

When I got out of high school, I was in a blues band. It was the kind of music I was interested in, and listening to, mostly because it was becoming a vehicle for a generation of guitarists – like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Mike Bloomfield. And that’s what I wanted to be, principally: a guitar player.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

Sometimes you could tell what it was about – it was interesting – and sometimes it was quite obvious that someone had lost it and it was on an endless loop.

– Todd Rundgren

Celebrities are the fodder of much of the media business, so they’re always interested in making you seem provocative when you’re not, or trying to bring you some sort of embarrassment by revealing something you’d rather not have revealed. That’s the downside of celebrity.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

That’s what I like about Frank Ocean or Bon Iver – they try to capture a feeling in the most sincere way.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

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.

– Todd Rundgren

I’m not a one-hit wonder as some suggest. I’ve had a couple of hits, but still, all of my hits were in the ’70s. There was pretty much nothing in the ’80s, ’90s, or in the first full decade into the next millennium.

– Todd Rundgren

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