Todd Rundgren

Upper Darby and Nazz

Todd Harry Rundgren was born on 22 June 1948 and grew up in Upper Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia, graduating from the high school there in 1966. That year he joined Woody's Truck Stop, a Philadelphia blues rock group. In 1967 he formed Nazz with the bassist Carson Van Osten, playing guitar and singing backing vocals, and wrote his first song, Hello It's Me. Nazz signed to Screen Gems Columbia in 1968 and put it on the B-side of their debut single, Open My Eyes, with Stewkey Antoni singing lead. Boston's WMEX turned the record over and played it to the top of its chart.

In 1969 he left the band, moved to New York and went to work for Albert Grossman at Bearsville. He engineered and mixed for the Band, including Stage Fright (1970), and finished Badfinger's Straight Up (1971).

Something/Anything?

His first two albums, Runt (1970) and Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (1971), came out under the name Runt. Something/Anything? (1972), a double album and the first under his own name, came next. Unhappy with other players, he recorded three of its four sides alone, playing every instrument and singing every vocal, then cut the fourth live at the Record Plant in New York with session players. He credited the speed of his writing to Ritalin and cannabis. I Saw the Light went to No. 16 in 1972, and a reissued Hello It's Me reached No. 5 in 1973, his only US top-ten hit. The album climbed back up the chart on the back of it and went gold in 1975.

In 1972 he founded Secret Sound Studios in New York, where he engineered almost all of A Wizard, a True Star (1973) himself. He was in demand as a producer too, with Grand Funk Railroad's We're an American Band and the New York Dolls' debut in 1973, and Hall & Oates' War Babies in 1974.

I essentially went back and re-recorded the first song that I ever wrote

Todd Rundgren, 2013

Utopia and Mink Hollow

The double album Todd followed in 1974, and in November that year Todd Rundgren's Utopia launched the band he would lead into the mid-1980s, best known in the line-up with Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton and Willie Wilcox. Initiation (1975) and Faithful (1976), half originals and half covers of songs from 1966, continued the solo run. In 1977 he produced Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell, a record Bearsville had turned down.

Late in 1977 he split from Bebe Buell and their infant daughter Liv, later known as Liv Tyler, and withdrew to his house on Mink Hollow Road near Woodstock. There he made Hermit of Mink Hollow (1978) almost entirely alone. It reached No. 36 in the US, was greeted as a return to form after the progressive Utopia records, and carried Can We Still Be Friends, his most-covered song. The live double Back to the Bars, drawn from week-long stands in New York, Los Angeles and Cleveland, followed in December.

The studio as instrument

Technology ran alongside the music. In 1978 he opened Utopia Video Studios and staged the first interactive television concert, and around 1980 he designed an early color graphics tablet and the Utopia Graphics System, a paint program for the Apple II. Healing (1981) and The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect (1982) closed his time at Bearsville. He signed to Warner Bros. for A Cappella (1985) and produced XTC's Skylarking in 1986. As TR-i he issued No World Order (1993), billed as the first interactive album, and around the turn of the century he ran PatroNet, a subscription service for his music.

He toured with Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band from 1992, joined Kasim Sulton and Prairie Prince in the New Cars, a revival of the Cars, in 2006, and kept making records, from the bossa nova remakes of With a Twist... (1997) to Space Force (2022). His memoir, The Individualist, came out in 2018. In 2021 Patti Smith inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he had long criticized. He was on tour and did not attend.

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called him a rock and roll maverick, and his biographer Paul Myers described the studio as his ultimate instrument. Hall & Oates, Björk and Daft Punk are among the musicians who cite him, and Sparks credit his production of Halfnelson, the album they made under that name, with launching their career. In 2026 he was on the road again with the Damned If I Do tour.