Todd Rundgren Quotes

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.

When you are making an album, it is about the purpose - you are creating both a concept and vibe, then you follow through with that.

I don't know what aids creativity. All I know is that it feels natural to hold a guitar in my hands and sing.

Normally when I do an album, I have a concept behind it.

I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

I like to think about the quality, content, and concept for my music because I think these are the most important things and it just molds everything together.

I'm always working on my own music, too. I've been working on a record for a few years.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before.

Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul.

When I'm recording, which is synonymous with writing, I'll play things over and over again until it sounds like I've got the right guitar part. Whereas I think, as the much younger player I tended to do things much more consciously. I didn't wait for the moment where inspiration might strike. That's what I do now. I wait for it to naturally start to replay itself in my mind. As I say, I don't force it. So I like to think of myself as a receiver. I'm a telephone line to who knows where, but until I hear it through that receiver, I don't usually do it. It's got to start writing itself somehow.

I'm creating songs. I do it most of the time, in the car or in the house.

I criticise these compositions by analysis but an illustration cannot be made that way - it must be made by inspiration.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else-building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army. ... I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened. ... I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising. ... I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah

When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music.

I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.

I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.

I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I'm probably the most proud of "Mrs. Potato Head," because I had that idea in my head for so long, and I tried writing that song one time and I just couldn't tell the story the way I wanted to, and I couldn't figure it out.

I love the creation process [of music] of it and then sharing it, so I think that was the shift. I never thought I was going to be on a label in general, I was like 'Oh, I wouldn't do that,' and then we ended up on the same label basically.