Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kay. Hello, how are you today? I hope you’re doing a whole lot better than me, given that I’m sitting here trying to work with a construction zone across the road and a massive concrete pour going on. Talk about noise.
It’s crazy. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t care about my woes. What you’re here for are my guests.
And today I’m going to introduce you to one very cool musician, songwriter and producer who’s worked with artists like Paddy Smith, The Band, Badfinger, Psychedelic Furs and Meatloaf, just to name a few. He’s the legendary 70s wonder kid, guitar guru, studio wizard and hit maker, Todd Rundgren. What do you say we meet him? I start off by asking Todd how he got into music in the first place.
Well, I wasn’t very good in school, so I was lucky to get out of high school and therefore I wasn’t distracted by any of that higher education stuff. I had few choices in terms of what I could do, and I was lucky to get into a band right off. We didn’t make a lot of money, but I stuck with it and I enjoyed it and I didn’t have big material aspirations.
I just wanted to stay clothed and fed and play music. And I got, for some reason, you know, I was always in the right place at the right time. I got my band discovered just because we were hanging out in a bar with Roger Daltrey and we looked like we were in a band.
After that kind of fell apart, after about 18 months, I was fortunate enough to get involved with the Albert Grossman Organization at a time when they were managing some of the biggest acts in the world, like The Band and Janis Joplin and people like that. Summertime, time, time Child, the living’s easy Fish are jumping out Hey, the cotton, Lord, cotton’s high Water, your daughter’s rich And your ma’s so good-looking, babe She’s looking good now Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby No, no, no, no, don’t you cry Don’t you cry That’s how my career started. It started more as an engineer and producer and then I was making vanity projects for myself and accidentally had a hit record.
That’s how I wound up making records with my name on them. Naz was really the first band that I did any recording with. Naz was really into the whole British thing.
I find it incredible, drawing on the music of people like The Beatles, that you’ve come full circle and now spend your days touring with Ringo Starr’s all-star band. Yeah, that was kind of ironic. My association with Ringo went like a decade before, at least, his all-star project.
Ringo wasn’t doing anything. He was just kind of idle, hanging around Hollywood, but he was friends with my manager, and there was this Labor Day event called the Jerry Lewis Telethon. It was for a particular cause, and Jerry decided he wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so they put together a band just for the sake of this telethon thing.
Ringo was in the band, and I was in the band. This was around 1978 or 79. This was long before he started the all-stars.
I think it had something to do with my eventual involvement. He asked me if I would be in the first all-stars, but I was already on tour with my other band, Utopia, and couldn’t do it, so I wound up on the third tour and then the fifth tour. I’ve looked high and low I’ve been from shore to shore to shore If there’s a shortcut I’d have found it But there’s no easy way around it Light of the world, shine on me Love is the answer Shine on us all, set us free Love is the answer I guess it was about 2008.
It was around 2010, 2011 that I rejoined the band, and he liked that particular line-up so much that we toured for five years. So I got a whole lot of experience playing with Ringo. Incredible from where you started to today.
But just to go back to Nas for a minute, you formed that in 1967, and you were really reverent to the Beatles, weren’t you? There was a lot of stuff coming out of there, but you saw your first hits come out of Nas, didn’t you? Well, by the time we had a so-called hit, it was a song from our first record, and it was the B-side to the song that we really wanted to be a hit, which was called Open My Eyes. Underneath your gaze I was wounded The haze I’m wandering around in I am lost in the dark of my own room And I can’t see a single light Open my eyes and make me wise For it’s all I’ve been needing in life That was a song that several bands have covered, not the least of which was The Move. There’s a great recording of them playing it live.
For some reason, the DJs flipped the record over and started playing Hello It’s Me, or Nas’ version, which is much dirgier than the one you’re probably familiar with. And I wasn’t even playing guitar on it. I was playing vibes on the record.
And that record started to take off after I had left the band. Like you said, the band only lasted 18 months, and immediately as we finished our second album, I split. And so I did a few gigs with the band, but I wasn’t actually in the band.
We would just fly out somewhere, play a high school prom or something, and then fly back for a little while, and then eventually they found a replacement for me. Hello, it’s me I’ve thought about us for a long, long time Maybe I think too much but something’s wrong There’s something here that doesn’t last too long Maybe I shouldn’t think of you as mine You mentioned Albert Grossman and his incredible organisation, which I guess was just fledgling at the time. The record company was called Bearsville Records.
He was managing Bob Dylan and working with a whole lot of people, as you said. How did you manage to become his in-house producer and engineer? Well, their problem was that most of the people on the roster had been folk musicians, and they were very successful during the folk age, but then when the Beatles came along, it blew that all away. And so they needed somebody younger with a younger perspective to sort of modernise a lot of the in-house acts.
And so they put me together with James Cotton and Ina and Sylvia, as well as the band and Jesse Winchester, just essentially to make their post-recording a little bit more contemporary, put it that way. And it worked? For some of them, it worked, yes. It was a great experience for me.
I mean, doing the Butterfield Blues Band and stuff, but that was a live record. I didn’t really have much to do with the musical direction of the band, but I was such a fan of Paul Butterfield, who was one of the, like I said, I was in a blues band when I was first out of high school, and we used to go to a place called the Cafe A Go Go in New York and see all of these blues acts, you know, and these acts from England where I saw Cream for the first time in this little room that held maybe 200 people. Wow.
So it was amazing to go from that, from sitting in the audience, just being in awe of these people and these players and then getting to, you know, befriend them and work with them, stuff like that. It was a terrific experience. Yes, I’m sure it absolutely was.
It’s getting near dawn When lights close their tired eyes I’ll soon be with you my love Give you my dull surprise I’ll be with you darling soon I’ll be with you when the stars start falling I’ve been waiting so long To be where I’m going In the sunshine of your love And then you decided to go to New York You decided to go out solo. Albert Grossman gave you a contract on your own and you formed a band called Runt. Well, Runt was not a band per se.
It was the title of my first album. People seemed to think that it was a band but the title of the album was Todd Rundgren for some reason. No, it was the name of the album.
It was kind of a nickname, an evil nickname that I had to live with my entire life. If there were worse ones, but it was just a nickname. And so I thought Todd Rundgren’s too hard for people to remember.
So I said, let’s call the album Runt, which was my nickname. Hang on, before you go on, were you the Runt of the litter? I was very small growing up. I was very weedy and short.
A lot of it was because I just felt like, you know, I had a bad opinion of myself and it was reinforced by everybody around me. And so until I got out of high school and finally started having control over my own life, in that year, my senior year and the year after that, I grew five inches. And now I’m six foot two.
I may be a little shorter now. I’m 76 years old, but I peaked at six two. Right.
And Ringo used to introduce me as the very tall Todd Rundgren. Very funny. And consequently, you got over all those complexes about having been called the Runt, I’m sure.
Yeah, after a while. First, I wasn’t aware of it. I wasn’t aware that I was suddenly getting taller than other people.
And when someone would say you’re taller, I’d say, wait a minute, I guess I am. My feet are bigger. It must be taller.
Leroy, boy, is that you? I thought your post-hanging days were through. Sunken eyes and full of sighs. Tell no lies.
You get wise. I tell you now, we’re gonna pull you through. There’s only one thing left that we can do.
We had to get you a woman. It’s like nothing else to make you feel sure you’re alive. We had to get you a woman.
We better get walking. We’re wasting time talking now. Todd, how did you balance out your desire both to be a solo singer and to work on other people’s albums as a producer and engineer? Did you just cut your time between both? Well, it worked terrifically for me, you know, especially in the early days when I had no kids.
You know, all I did was music. I would do like, I might do two solo albums of my own within a year and a Utopia record and four productions. You know, I was just in the studio all the time.
And for me, the best part about it was that I was making such a good living as a record producer. I didn’t have to have that economic self-consciousness when I was making my own records. You know, other artists, they always had to worry about how much they were going to sell or the label dropped them and stuff like that.
Since I was producing so much stuff for Bearsville, I was unlikely to be dropped from the label. As a matter of fact, I had to fight to get off it eventually. And so I never thought about that when I was making records.
And it gave me this kind of liberty, this freedom that ultimately characterized the way I work, which is I don’t ever think about the audience reaction to what I’m doing or whether there are hits on it or anything like that. I just think about the musical experience that I want to create. And as a result, I have no style.
I have no, you know, I’m one of the few artists who can escape AI imitation because you say write a Todd song, you know, and it’s like, well, starting where? Yeah, right, right. You certainly have different phases. But I guess at that particular time it gave you the go-ahead to experiment all you liked with Utopia, for example, didn’t it? And you certainly experimented wildly.
Yeah, well, that was also an opportunity to at the time I had a fascination with what was happening contemporarily in music, even if it didn’t apply directly to me. In other words, I personally never went prog rock. But there was a certain point at which I thought I invested so much time trying to learn how to play the guitar.
I need and my solo records are turning out to be like all piano and stuff like that. I’m writing on the piano. And the basis of most of the music is like keyboard bass.
And I’m only like throwing in a solo every once in a while. So I thought I need something so that I don’t lose my chops, so that I stay kind of up to date as a guitar player. And that’s why I started Utopia.
And it also gave me the opportunity to dabble in prog rock and still do the kind of stuff that was more personal for my own records. I knew that there was something wrong And a feeling that threw at me And the answer was plain to see Cause I saw the light in your eyes So I played Utopia in my head Todd Farngren had plenty of hits through the 70s and 80s, many of them becoming enduring contemporary standards, like the one you just heard, the spoof of Carole King’s I Saw The Light. His hits always displayed his sharp commercial instinct, and he had no trouble attracting a cult audience that remained faithful for decades.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. Todd Rundgren is a pop savant who fastidiously avoided easy categorisation through the course of his career, managing instead to straddle the gap separating a mainstream star from a cult figure. He is also the author of a number of books, including a book titled, The Art of Being a Musician.
The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, including a book titled, The Art of Being a Musician.
He is also the author of a number of books, including a book titled, The Art of Being a Musician. including a book titled, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician.
He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician.
He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. The Art of Being a Musician.
He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician.
He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician. He is also the author of a number of books, He is also the author of a number of books, The Art of Being a Musician.
He is also the author of a number of books, He is also the author of a number of books, Can we still be friends? Heartbreak’s never easy to take But can we still be friends? Can we still be friends? It’s a strange, sad affair Sometimes seems like we just don’t care Don’t waste time feeling hurt We’ve been through hell together You were never commercially focused. You were always music focused and had that interest, as you said. You were completely self-taught, other than a few little lessons when you were a small kid? Yeah, yeah, I had some guitar lessons, which I quickly forgot, you know, but they came with the instrument.
My parents had to buy lessons in order to get the instrument cheap. Yeah, it wasn’t that I was completely ignorant of the commercial concerns. When I was working with other artists, they wanted singles, you know, and so I had to be aware of, you know, what went into a single and what was on the radio and that sort of thing.
But my purpose was not to repeat what other people were doing, you know, or just be redundant or say, I could do that, I’d just do it better. No, I have to do something. I can’t justify my existence by simply imitating other people.
I have to do something that other people wouldn’t do. Well, you managed to do that with aplomb, didn’t you? Because you worked with so many artists and had so many hits, not the least of which was Bad Finger and Baby Blue, which just skyrocketed up every chart everywhere. Yeah, well, that was, again, in a certain sense, right place, right time, because by the time we got to that record, they had already made two.
They had made a whole album, which apparently Apple in America was not happy with. So they sent him back in the studio. That’s when they went in with George Harrison and started a record.
But then George got distracted by the concert for Bangladesh and the album and everything that went with that. And so that’s when I got involved. And by then, you know, the band was just exhausted and kind of did whatever I told them.
They weren’t happy about it, but I said, I’m not going to waste another year, you know, trying to come up with a record. You know, we have to have a record here. Let’s do it.
And Baby Blue was essentially the first song we recorded, the first new song that we recorded. So, you know, there were other songs that George had recorded that we had to rework and just maybe a couple from the original Jeff Emerick sessions that we reworked. So half of the album was new songs and Baby Blue was one of them.
I’d forget Or I’d regret The special love I had for you Baby blue The days became so long Did you really think I’d do you wrong Dixie, when I let you go Thought you’d realise I would know I would show The special love I had for you Baby blue You kept putting out solo albums, meanwhile, in your spare time, I guess, and you were certainly into doing a whole bunch of recreations from the 60s, bands like Yardbirds, Dylan, Beatles, Hendrix, Beach Boys. I loved your resurrection of Good Vibrations. That became your first Top 40 hit in three years.
That was an awesome offering. That was weird, yeah. It was so literal, you know.
It’s exactly what I said that I don’t do, try and imitate other people. But I was trying to… The purpose of it was not to show off necessarily what I could do in the studio, but to remind people what radio was like 10 years earlier. Because in the 60s, radio was still fairly independent.
You know, a lot of independent local stations and the local DJs and program directors would decide what got played. And by 10 years later, everything’s syndicated. And every radio station is playing the same list of songs and stuff like that.
And all of that sort of more interesting stuff you wouldn’t hear anymore. You wouldn’t hear much of Bob Dylan anymore. Jimi Hendrix wasn’t making records anymore.
But yeah, there was so much freedom in terms of what you might hear back in the 60s compared to the 70s and ever since. And now nobody cares about radio. Hasn’t it changed completely? With record companies, with radio output, it’s a whole new world.
You’ve managed to navigate all of those changes. You’ve been able to reinvent yourself time and time again, obviously, and in different genres and ways, so that, as you said earlier, you’re unable to be pigeonholed for any particular style of music, which I guess has been incredibly necessary over the years, hasn’t it? Well, it’s given me a particular kind of audience, you know, an especially loyal audience. If you play something and it’s hot for a while, you know, you become like a disco artist or something like that.
As soon as that style of music, as soon as people lose interest in that style of music, they lose interest in you. And so when I went from something, anything, to A Wizard of Truestar, it was the great calling. It was like all the people who just wanted to hear me be the male Carole King, they all left when they heard A Wizard of Truestar.
We are gay It’s kind of weird But there’s more For me But there’s always more And it is more International food And it is more Interplanetary food And it does not matter tonight And it is more And it is more International food The ones who stayed said, this is more fun than if he tried to do the same record again. It’s so much different than the other record that it’s kind of more fun. And each record was different than the previous one.
And that became an attraction for what is my core audience. They don’t know what to expect. No, they never knew what was coming out next from you.
That’s right. And they’re fine with that. They’re fine that I don’t repeat everything that I do.
Well, I guess they certainly understand that whatever comes next is going to be awesome. It doesn’t matter what it actually is. It’s going to be great.
Well, I’m going to take it seriously, put it that way. That’s very humble of you. I’ve had some questionable moments as well.
There are things that I probably should not have done, but I don’t particularly regret any of it. It’s all, again, it’s a learning experience for me. It’s a learning experience for my audience.
When I try out something new, we all discover together whether it works or not and whether we’ll bother to keep any of it going forward. You talk about being the male version of Carole King. I guess Can We Still Be Friends would come into that realm, wouldn’t it? That’d be one of them.
A lot of these songs I don’t, particularly ones that seem more accessible, I don’t think a lot about. They just kind of come out. I’ve got some chords, I’ve got a subject.
Okay, we’ll put a song together here. And when that happens, it seems like the song’s not only more accessible to the audience, but Can We Still Be Friends is one of my most covered songs, like Rod Stewart and Robert Palmer, and the list goes on of people who have covered Can We Still Be Friends. We can’t play this game anymore But can we still be friends Things just can’t go wrong We had something to learn Now it’s time for the wheel to turn Planes of sand, one by one Before you notice Hold on Let’s admit we made a mistake But can we still be friends Heartbreaks never easy to take But can we still be friends It’s a strange set of plans Sometimes seems like we just don’t care Don’t waste time feeling the hurt We’ve been through heaven Heaven I haven’t had anything similar recently, you know, so I have to go out and actually, like, stir up collaborations with people in order to get them to record my material.
I’m sure a lot of people know how heavily involved you were with Meatloaf in the production of That Out of Hell. Can you share a story or two about that? And I guess when you started out on that, none of you would have ever expected it to blow up like it did, did you? Well, I was the producer of Last Resort for them. Were you? They were about to give up because they didn’t have recorded demos.
They did live demos. And the first time I saw it was all live. Steinman on the piano and Ellen Foley and Rory Dodd on backgrounds and Meatloaf running around the rehearsal studio.
And they played essentially almost everything that was on the first record. And I think, you know, reaction of most other people that heard it was, oh, the songs are too long. This guy is too weird and big and fat.
And how is he ever going to be a pop star? They had all kinds of, I guess, assumptions about, you know, what could be done with the music. And when I heard it, I said, this is a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. And, you know, Bruce Springsteen was on the cover of Time magazine, the savior of rock and roll, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I’m like, oh, no. He’s singing about motorcycles and switchblades and leather jackets and that kind of crap, you know. I thought that was over in the 50s, you know, rebel without a cause, you know.
And here it is back again. We’re not making any progress. When I saw Me Love, I said, this is perfect.
You know, this will be a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. This will just take it way beyond. And everyone will see the melodrama, you know, and the fact that, you know, that this is all kind of like, it’s like the unrecorded soundtrack of Grease, you know, something like that.
And so that’s how, in my mind, that’s how I proceeded with the whole thing. And how I managed to take it seriously was a serious spoof of Bruce Springsteen. Did he ever find out that that’s what had been in your mind? Well, I’ve said it in public enough times, you know.
You haven’t heard back from him? Oh, Bruce Springsteen. He and I don’t talk for some reason. I don’t know.
You think it could have anything to do with that? No. Yeah, I’ve met him once, but we’re not in the same circles, you know. I mean, he’s up in this parapathetic, you know, he’s got his giant posse and stuff like that, you know.
It’s like he plays arenas and I play theatres, you know. That’s pretty much it. We never cross paths.
You never cross paths. Nonetheless, the inspiration served Todd well because we all know what became of Bad Out of Hell.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Meatloaf’s recording in 1977, Bad Out of Hell, sold over 43 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time.
It was certified 14 times platinum and spent a whopping 522 weeks in the UK Albums Chart, the fourth longest chart run by a studio album. Tod is still bemused by its success today. The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling, we’re down in the valley tonight.
There’s a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye and a blade shining oh so bright. There’s evil in the air and there’s thunder in the sky and a killer’s on the bloodshot streets. Oh, I’m down in the tunnel with a deadly horizon and I swear I saw a young boy down in the gutter.
He was stuck in the foam and the heat. Oh, baby, you’re the only thing in this whole world that’s real and you’re the only one. And wherever you go, wherever you go, there’s always gonna be some light.
But I gotta get out, I gotta break it out now, I can’t walk, I can’t talk. So we gotta make the most of our one night together when it’s all day and all, we’ll both be sober now. I gotta get out, I gotta break it out now, I can’t talk.
In 89 you released Nearly Human, which was again a very different sort of sound for you, wasn’t it? Well, by the time the process of record making got to the end of the 90s, people had gotten too crazy with overdubbing and multi-tracking and by then, Simon took over working on Meat Loaf records, but he’d always ask me to come do background vocals and I’d go to the studio and there’d be tapes from floor to ceiling along every fricking wall because he’d be running two, three machines at once. Virtual 72 tracks of stuff and I thought, how do you sort that out ever? How do they go through all of that to figure out what they wanted to keep? And I thought, man, this overdubbing thing and the tracks and stuff like that, it’s just getting out of hand. So I thought, I want to do a record like they did it in the old days, where everybody plays at the same time and there’s no overdubs.
Really the old-fashioned way? Yeah, it was one of the major musical experiences of my life because unlike almost every other record that I had made, you don’t know what the final product sounds like until the last person has put their overdubs on. Then you try and get objective about it and listen to it all together. But when you’re recording it all live, no overdubs, you realize at a certain point you’re listening to the record.
You’re performing it and listening to it at the same time. You’re hearing while you’re doing what everyone else in the world is going to hear. And it’s such a weird feeling.
It’s just mystical and it’s hard to focus on what you’re doing because you realize, I’m making the record in real time right now. And when I stop singing, the record’s done. I don’t have to do anything else except mix it.
There’s always that tightrope when you’re doing stuff live. It puts you in a different place, but it’s the reason why you have the privilege of being paid to do it. People pay to see a performance.
They don’t pay to see you do what they do in their own everyday lives. They pay to see you do something where when you start it, you can’t stop. You can’t say, oh, I gotta go to the bathroom now or I’m tired, I’ll take a nap.
You have to do it from beginning to end. That’s sports, that’s musical performance, that’s acting on stage and stuff like that. Once you start, you can’t stop.
You can’t break the spell. How many albums have you put out, Todd Rundgren, under your own name? I’m up to 25. Have you got a different count? Well, there are some independent albums and other albums.
There are albums that I think have only been released in certain territories. So the count is over 30, but I haven’t really tallied it. You just keep on going.
Amazing. You did recently a celebration of the Beatles’ 1968 double album with the tour. It was 50 years ago today, which was awesome.
It was a tribute to the White Album featuring people like Mickey Dolenz, Christopher Cross and… Fortunately, we did another Beatle tour after that. I always consider the White Album the Beatles’ worst album. So do I. Well, it’s like four soloists at that point.
You suddenly realize all this Lennon-McCartney stuff, it was either mostly Lennon or mostly McCartney. And then when they stopped pretending that they were writing it all together, it just became really obvious. So at that point, it was kind of a document that journaled the breaking up of the band.
But it was also kind of the beginning of George Harrison’s career. People started saying, oh, George has got some interesting things to say. So in that sense, it was an inevitable thing.
But I thought in terms of Beatle records, it was not a very good record. It was flabby. There was a bunch of junk in there that didn’t need to be there.
And of course, John and Yoko’s experiments, which had absolutely nothing to do with the Beatles. What the hell does that mean? We did another tour, some of the same personnel, but we did another tour since then, which was Revolver and Rubber Soul, their best records. I feel much better about having done those tributes after we got to do Revolver and Rubber Soul because that was the Beatles when they were evolving into something they were getting really serious as musicians and they were being really exploratory and discovering new genres that people had yet to actually start to mine in musical terms.
So that material I love doing. Good day sunshine I need to laugh and when the sun is out I’ve got something I can laugh about I feel good in a special way I’m in love and it’s a sunny day We take a walk, the sun is shining down Burns my feet as they touch the ground A lot of the other stuff I had to figure out some sort of conceit, you know, like if I was doing Bungalow Bill I had to dress up like I was on safari and squirt everybody in the audience with a water rifle. I hear you like getting dressed up, you did quite a bit of that through your career.
Oh yeah, well I think it’s part of the aspect of performance. It’s always bothered me when bands just get up there in their street clothes or just kind of like go into your own world and roll up your eyes and stand there and don’t do anything but sing, you know, it’s fine but even opera singers don’t do that. You’ve got to put on a show otherwise people might as well close their eyes.
Nowadays you’re the accompaniment to a light show. You’re the musical accompaniment to a light show. People watch the lights, there’s not much else to watch.
You are coming to Australia, what are Australian audiences going to see from you? What’s on your set list? Well, I’ve done something different every time I come. Why am I not surprised by that? Well, early on we probably put more emphasis on the older songs because I hadn’t been around. I haven’t really cultivated the audience.
The first time I came to Australia was in the 90s and that was just a promotional tour. I had never played here all through the time when I was most successful. So I’m trying to make a concerted effort to rebuild the audience and get there regularly and also not treat them as if they don’t know anything, as if they’re completely unaware of everything that’s happened in my career up until now.
And if they are, then I have to educate them to that. So this tour will be essentially a slightly abridged version of the tour that I did last year with my own band in the US. And it’s mostly, there’s some familiar material in it and we do touch base on the so-called hits because there aren’t very many of them, but it’s more like deep cuts, songs that I like to play and songs that I know a segment of the audience likes to hear, which aren’t necessarily the most familiar songs to the average listener.
If there was one song you had to choose as your most favourite song to play, which would that be? Oh, it’s hard to say at this point. You know, there were times when I did a record, I would have to play the songs and I would enjoy playing them because they’re new. But then, you know, I’d do another record and move on.
So those songs, I guess, don’t have as deep a meaning for me as some of the other ones. But there’s songs that I think represent the range of what I try to do, both in terms of songwriting and playing and singing. A song like Buffalo Grass, which is not familiar to most people and is from a rather obscure record called One Long Year.
Even for people who’ve never heard it before, it has an effect on them and that’s why I like to play it. They realize, I don’t know what this song is, but by the time we get to the end of it, they say, I love that song. So you know, become sort of an audience favourite, even though most people don’t own the record that it’s on.
Sorry twice when I felt complete Three times thought I’d get some peace Dozen times when there’s no release And I was already old And I was only white and black Hoping to steal And I was already white and black Hoping to steal And I was already It’s not as if I’m ignoring their concerns. I have done some, by my own estimation, some bad performances that I regret. And usually that’s because I have allowed myself to be distracted by something else and I’m not there for them 100%.
So while I’m doing it, it’s really about them. I like to sing and I sing when I’m around the house, but I don’t like sing a whole song and try and stay in tune the whole time and remember all the words and everything that goes with delivering at least a competent performance. And when I return from Australia, I’ll be doing a tribute tour to Burt Bacharach.
That’s a whole other thing, a whole different approach that I have to take for that. People always remark how come you never use a teleprompter? How come you go to the trouble of remembering the words all the time for a tour that you’re not going to do again? And that’s because I don’t want to be up there trying to remember the words. I want to be up there knowing the words and being able to essentially embody the spirit, the meaning of the song, commit myself fully to that.
So does that mean you’ve got to put in an awful lot of rehearsal time before you go out? Well, I have to do personal rehearsal time, but for the Bacharach tour, we’re only doing two days. Todd Rundgren singing Burt Bacharach, not a pairing I would have ever expected. Yeah, big early influence on me.
Favorite Burt Bacharach song? Oh, it’s hard to say. The first one that sort of hooked me was Walk On By, of course. But yeah, it’s a big catalogue.
Thank you for being so generous with your time with us. All the best. Bye now.
Take care. With Sandy Kaye.