Todd Rundgren’s biggest hit is also his “greatest disappointment in the world”
“I never look for music by genre. I look for an artist who puts a dependable trademark on things. Like Elvis Costello – he’s a great songwriter who presents his songs in a number of contexts,” Todd Rundgren once said. “I feel the same about my own music.” Indeed, like the David Lynch of music, it’s hard to place Rundgren in any category that isn’t simply his own name.
However, contrary to how it might seem, being yourself takes time. What comes quickly once you’re an accomplished musician is assimilating everything you’ve come across before into a slapdash stew of cliches. The problem Rundgren had with this was that he was in such a purple patch in the early 1970s, having conquered the craft on the other side of the mixing desk, that he knew his stew of borrowed ingredients would be catchy at the very least.
“‘I Saw The Light’ is just a string of clichés,” he admits. “It’s absolutely nothing that I ever thought, or thought about, before I sat down to write the song.” He was around 24 at the time, but thanks to most of the stuff that occupied the radio, he took on the persona of a 15-year-old weighing up the realities of love or lack thereof. This is a commonplace tact, but it isn’t what Rundgren wanted to do. And yet, he also knew he had to launch himself as a viable solo artist to expand his musical horizons.
“I wrote this song in 15 minutes from start to finish,” he claims. “It was one of the reason that caused me to change my style of writing. It doesn’t matter how clever a song is – if it’s written in 15 minutes, it is such a string of clichés that it just doesn’t have lasting impact for me. And for me, the greatest disappointment in the world is not being able to listen to my own music and enjoy it.”
He was cursed by the fact he knew it was a hit, as is often the case when “come spilling out”, he said in a Red Bull Music talk, so he even stuck it as the opener for his album, Something/Anything?, in Motown tradition, but he has never been best pleased with it.
However, while the song might not have had the depth and originally that he was hoping for, it’s such an epic groove, laden with teenage reverie, that he gets away with it and then some from a listener’s perspective.
Sadly, the hidden adrenaline in the mix that allowed for such was Rundgren’s growing reliance on Ritalin. “It caused me to crank out songs at an incredible pace,” he said. “You can see why, too, the rhymes are just moon/June/spoon kind of stuff.”
