Trivia / Todd Rundgren

• Black Sheep Hit: "Bang the Drum All Day" isn't very typical of his work. To be fair, his output is so stylistically diverse that no single song could be very typical of his work, but "Bang the Drum All Day" is an outlier even by those standards.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Rundgren has stated that The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect was recorded just so he could get out of his contract with Bearsville, in spite of including above-mentioned Black Sheep Hit.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics didn't like Todd Rundgren's Utopia very much, but it's the second best selling Utopia album and Progressive Rock fans still love it.
• Doing It for the Art: Seems to be his only reason for being involved in music.
  • If an act he's producing has unfinished songs, he's been known to finish their songs, but refuse a writer's credit for doing so.
  • When making A Wizard, a True Star, he sought "to imprint the chaos in my head onto a record without trying to clean it up for everyone else's benefit," which he acknowledged resulted in a loss of half his audience at the time. He wasn't remotely bothered about this. Admittedly, he'd made enough money from production that he didn't have to worry too much about the success of his solo material, which essentially afforded him a form of Protection from Editors as well.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • At home games at Lambeau Field, "Bang the Drum All Day" is played every time the Green Bay Packers score a touchdown.
  • Wayne Gladstone uses a snippet of Utopia's "Everybody Else Is Wrong" as his intro for his Cracked series Hate by Numbers.
• What Could Have Been: He was involved with the production of Donda thanks to fan 88-Keys, but claims that his contributions were unused before offering a blunt assessment of Kanye's process.

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