Todd Rundgren Quotes

With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

I've always believed you should sing songs you can really put yourself into. I think the emotion you put into it is just as important as singing the notes.

I've read and heard that some of the most inspiring vocal interpreters adhere habitually to one rule: Always think the lyrics as you're singing them, so that the sentiment is always appropriate and heartfelt.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

There's so many singers, you watch them and a lot of it is waving around. You don't get this feeling that they're really thinking about what they're saying.

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.

I think there's always pieces of yourself that bleed into your character. That's inevitable.

I learned by listening to other people sing and doing impressions of them. And there are things no one can ever teach you, like phrasing. By listening to Sinatra, for instance - you felt that everything he sang had happened in his life.

What people don't understand is that how you are as an artist depends on how you are emotionally.

When I play, I very quickly put myself into a light hypnotic trance and compose while playing, drawing directly from the emotions.

When a singer truly feels and experiences what the music is all about, the words will automatically ring true.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

Most people remember being 4 objectively, as if they're seeing a movie of a 4-year-old. But me, if you ask me to think about when I'm 4, I can feel myself being 4, and I am there, looking out through my 4-year-old eyes.

I cry whenever I watch an emotional scene that I did, just because it brings me back to that moment. It's like, I remember being there; I remember feeling what I felt. It's really weird, right?

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

I only record songs that touch me in some way, ones that I can relate to.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.

When I sing, I try to communicate certain emotions, and that's the voice that comes out.

I don't consider myself as a great painter; I just feel that art is about expressing your emotions and expressing your feelings, and music is the same way; you can see what other people are going through.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I'm at mentally.

I think that's how any actor would make their performance convincing: by bringing an element of themselves into the character.

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

In my songs, I try to look through someone else's eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.