Todd Rundgren has amassed an incredible music resume since the 1970s.

As a producer, he’s been involved in numerous acclaimed albums including The New York Dolls’ influential self-titled debut, Meat Loaf’s landmark full-length “Bat Out Of Hell” and “The New America” from the punk act Bad Religion.

He’s also a prolific musician, with his hits “Hello It’s Me”, “I Saw The Light” and “Bang The Drum All Day” still getting radio play. On June 21 at The Park Theatre in Cranston, Rundgren and his band will be venturing through his extensive discography. The show starts at 8pm and it promises to be a great way to spend a Saturday night.

We talked ahead of his performance about the messaging behind the show, his views on collaboration, one of his hits being regularly played during sporting events, and a new project he has in the works.

Rob Duguay: This upcoming show at The Park Theatre is part of a tour you’re doing that has the title “Still Me / Still We”, which is an extension of your “Me / We” tour that took place last year. You’ve mentioned that the shows on this run center on a story with a message through your songs, so what exactly is that message?

Todd Rundgren: The first thing is that you don’t give up. Life goes on, you adapt to it, and you have to do it in a way that doesn’t betray yourself or the people that have faith in you. Change is always possible, sometimes it’s necessary, and the power to change the world always resides within you. It’s not a process that you reach the end of, it’s a lifelong thing.

I didn’t have a bunch of new material to build a new show around, that was one thing, but I also realized that my tour last year ended before the events of Election Day, which eventually changed the world, and it changed the meaning of everything I was doing. It’s not as if my tour would have changed the outcome, but the outcome changed the world, and that is something we all have to confront while doubling our efforts to be our better selves. There’s a lot of temptation to just give up, there’s a lot of temptation to fight hate with hate, and I think it still bears reminding that the world changes when you change.

RD: Back in 2022, you released “Space Force” with the title being a tongue-in-cheek reference to the initiative that took place during the first four years of the Trump administration. You worked with a lot of different acts on the album, including Adrian Belew, The Roots, Rivers Cuomo from Weezer, Steve Vai and Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick among others. How did you go about bringing these people into the fold for the songwriting and recording process? Was it all done remotely during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, or were you all able to schedule out studio dates together?

TR: I started recording before the COVID lockdown. My previous album was a highly concerted and elaborate work. I usually write the material and ask someone else to perform on it, so by the time I got to “Space Force”, I told myself that I had to give up the rest of this. If I truly wanted to collaborate, I had to let other people start writing material as well, so during “Space Force” I asked everyone to contribute an orphan song. Something they started and they never finished where it maybe got to the demo phase but not beyond that, so most of the material is actually unfinished songs from the other collaborators.

RD: Oh, wow.

TR: Yeah, so they would give it to me, and I would finish it with either writing new lyrics or adding new parts to it while flushing out the arrangement. There are songs where I don’t sing at all and the entirety of my contribution is in the production where I play and add instruments and things like that to change the arrangement of the song. I then ultimately do the recording and mix it down, so it was different in that way and it also kind of marked the end of that process for me, that aggressively collaborative thing. The work that I’m doing now is going back to me working with a concept of my own and doing most of the work myself. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be other collaborators on it, but it’s going to be more like my previous work where I write everything and I create all the sound.

RD: You worked with a lot of different people throughout your career as both a musician and a producer, so what would you say is your core approach to collaboration and how do you view it? Do you take each experience of working with another musician as an opportunity to learn something?

TR: It’s always a learning opportunity. I’ve never had a specific style per say, even though some people make assumptions and try to compare the records that I’ve made. [Grand Funk Railroad’s] “We’re An American Band” is nothing like [Meat Loaf’s] “Bat Out Of Hell”, and that album is nothing like [XTC’s] “Skylarking”. For me, it’s all about adapting to the act and their material while trying to figure out how to put it in the best light. In my early production days, I used to maybe get a little bit too involved. For instance, if the band was having trouble coming up with material, I might get aggressively involved in the writing process. You can say that with an album like “Remote Control” with The Tubes, I’m not credited as a songwriter but I wrote most of the lyrics on the record.

I came up with many of the melodies, a lot of the arrangements and things like that. At that point, I had realized that I was taking over too much of the process, so I made adjustments. I  make sure they have all the material before we go into the studio so I won’t be called on to get involved in the writing process. When that happens it becomes recognizably me, and that’s a problem. You’re not supposed to be making a record about yourself and your own taste, you’re supposed to be putting the artist and their material in the best possible light.

RD: I totally get that. Through your 1983 hit “Bang The Drum All Day”, you’re one of a few musicians who has your music being played at sporting events on a regular basis. I know the Green Bay Packers always play the song at Lambeau Field when they score a touchdown and it’s also been played during hockey games as well. What are your thoughts on having your music be in a different realm in a transcendent way?

TR: In some ways, it’s the ultimate success. I know it’s in the public domain now, but nobody remembers the people who wrote “Happy Birthday”, but everybody knows the song. You used to have to pay the people who wrote it if you used it in any kind of context where commerce was involved, so I kind of like it. I would almost prefer if nobody knew if I wrote “Bang The Drum All Day” so nobody would expect me to play it live, because it’s a real pain in the ass to play live.

RD: I can imagine.

TR: It’s just a bunch of jumping around and yelling, plus it’s disruptive to the show when you bring out drums and stuff just to do the one song. It’s not one of the ones that I regularly do live, and for some tours it doesn’t make any sense at all. When you’ve penetrated the culture to that degree, that’s an achievement of some kind, when somebody knows the song and they have no idea who wrote it. That elevates it to another level of culture, so I’m bemused by it. I never took the song so seriously that I thought it couldn’t be used in any other context and as a matter of fact, the general public familiarity of the song has made it the most financially rewarding composition than I’ve ever dreamed.

I won’t be doing anything but making music all day long, and then suddenly I’ll start dreaming songs as well. If I can remember them after the dream, then they become an actual song, and that’s what happened with “Bang The Drum All Day”. It was a song that came to me in a dream that wouldn’t have come to me in my waking life because it’s just too silly. I would never think about writing a song about just banging on the drum all day, it just wouldn’t occur to me, but in a dream it just becomes fully realized and I try to capture as much of it as I can remember. Bearsville Records released it as a single and it was never on the radio with my name on it, except when years later, it started to become a drivetime staple on Fridays. ‘

It became identified with silly good times and whatever that I got an incredible amount of money for licensing it for things like movie trailers or commercials and in particular for Carnival Cruise Line, who used it for years.

RD: That’s an incredible story behind the song. It’s really cool. You mentioned earlier how you’re working on a new project, so how has it been coming along and when can we expect it to come out?

TR: A substantial part of it has been done by now, but I have this other project that’s going on as well, which was formerly called PatroNet. In the ‘90s, I put together what was the first internet-based subscription service that was designed so I could get direct support from my fans and I wouldn’t have to get support from a label. At the time, I sensed that the label system was beginning to collapse, which it indeed did when more and more people started getting their music through the internet. That was a project that got started and it looked like it was going to be successful, but I didn’t really build a company behind it, so it collapsed under its own weight. It went moribund for a while, and then other people took up the mantle, in particular Spotify and Patreon.

When COVID hit, I had plenty of time on my hands and I couldn’t go out on the road, so I couldn’t do what I usually do to make money from my fans with concert tickets and merchandise, so I’ve spent the last several years since then reviving it under a different name. During the tour I’ll be hyping it, getting people familiar with the concept and soon after that, ideally people will be signing up for the service, which is all built and ready to go. Once I get that out of the way, I can turn my focus back on making new music. Building a business is a serious thing and it has been a real distraction from music making, but I’m reaching the end of that process.