McCartney Times

Upper Darby-born Todd Rundgren has lived on the Hawaiian island of Kuai for two decades now — a paradise existence except when the perpetually creative singer wants to make an album.“As a result, most of the records that I’ve made in recent years have been, uh, all me,” the singer says with a laugh by phone from New York, where he was finishing a jaunt with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band before starting his own tour, which brings him to Penn’s Peak near Jim Thorpe Dec. 1.“Some collaboration, but it’s just too difficult to have people drop by for a session. So it’s just easier to make the records myself.”That hasn’t slowed Rundgren, who is best known for his 1970s hits “Hello, It’s Me” (a song he originally did with the band The Nazz), “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” “Can We Still Be Friends,” and 1983’s “Bang the Drum All Day.” In the two decades since moving to Hawaii, he’s released 10 albums.

Rundgren says working solo got him to feeling “like I was getting into something of an echo chamber.”

So for his latest album, Rundgren decided he “would collaborate more on the record. And so the record essentially is a result of my reaching out to a number of artists and asking if they wanted to work on something with me.”

And through “various configurations and a lot of file swapping” came Rundgren’s “White Knight,” a disc, released in May, that pairs him with more than 15 artists on 15 songs of varying genres.

Some matchups are obvious. On the song “Chance For Us,” for example, he works with famed sax player Bobby Strickland, with whom he’s played since his early solo album “Todd” in 1974, and fellow Philadelphia-area native Daryl Hall, with whom he first worked when producing Hall and Oates’ third album, “War Babies,” that same year.

Some were less expected: Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor on “Deaf Ears” and classic soul singer Bettye Lavette on “Naked and Afraid.”

Rundgren says he approached the record by making a list of two dozen people — “just a variety of genres; anyone I thought, you know, might be willing. … A lot of these people I never met before; didn’t know what their temperament might be. But people that I wanted to work with, and people that I had worked with before, as well.

“And the end result is really those artists who actually delivered by the deadline,” he says with a laugh.

Others who appear on the disc include the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Swedish singer Robyn.

Rundgren says he first met Lavette more than a decade ago, when both performed at a 40th anniversary of The Beatles’ concerts at The Hollywood Bowl with the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra.

Source: Todd Rundgren, playing in Jim Thorpe, keeps banging his drum as music industry changes – The Morning Call