'Something/Anything?', 'A Wizard, A True Star', 'Initiation', 'Healing', 'Nearly Human', 'The Individualist', 'With a Twist'... These are just a sampling of the many titles that Todd Rundgren has produced as a solo artist. In a way, the names offer a gateway to his experience as a creative journeyman who ventures through the daily jungles of the human race, as well as the treacherous creative quicksand within the music industry -- a place that hides behind false smiles and meddles with an artist's innate musical integrity.

Of course, the album titles, including the lyrics and music contained within each one, suggest only a tidbit of Rundgren's creative and human soul. Over three decades, he has worked in bands (Nazz and Utopia), made nearly two dozen solo recordings, produced a host of other acts, including the megaplatinum Bat Out of Hell, and made some of the first music videos in his own studio.

Since the late 1970's, Rundgren has embraced computer technology. This eventually led to the first interactive album, 1993's No World Order. He took matters a step further in 1996 with the formation of Waking Dreams (www.wakingdreams.com). Its aim is for "the development and licensing of original and undervalued ideas into marketable content, services, and technologies." One example of this is Rundgren's Internet site (www.tr-i.com), which offers a subscription service to his work.

As it turns out, Rundgren isn't a man who has fallen for the digital age at the expense of the human condition. His search for meaning has affected his work in the studio, on the concert stage, and his daily activity. Throughout it all, he remains an intellectual pragmatist, cognizant of the possibilities and frailties of Earth's inhabitants, while unerringly heading down a bold visionary path.

What is it that has kept your music so vital over the years?

Todd Rundgren: I'm sort of a natural musician. I never had to work at any other thing for very long. A lot of artists, once they have passed their peak, start to lose interest in the form and find excuses to move on to other things. For me, fortunately, there has always been enough of a level of interest to continue to do it. A musician like myself who has been around thirty years would probably feel disconnected from what's happening musically. I remain connected by at least producing other people, if not by incorporating contemporary influences into what I am doing.

You're now known for your work with computers. What is your opinion of the whole electronica movement? Someone said that it's the ultimate punk rock, because you can basically do it in your bedroom.

Todd Rundgren: Something that seems as strictly contemporary as techno or electronica music actually has deep roots that go all the way back to the days when tape was just beginning to be used for sound. As soon as they were able to find new media to put these things on, there were always people who would experiment with it and do unusual things. Those days, the best you could do was with a razor blade: cutting up pieces of tape and sticking them together and out of order. Now we can do all that on computer, and we tend to forget that the technique predates the computer. To me, it doesn't appear as revolutionary and new as everyone says it is.

But one thing about the technologization of music that has bothered me is when people express their belief that you're supposed to make this such an egalitarian exercise that anybody can make music. I don't go for that argument, because anybody could always make music. I mean, you don't need a guitar. You can sing, you can hum, you can do something. You know, in some cultures to make music is considered a civic duty, and everyone makes some kind of music. It's all about your desire to make it. Musicians are people who want to to do it so bad, or have such a need to express themselves through this medium, that they overcome the embarrassment and develop the skill and the mental attitude to produce music for other people to listen to.

You seem to be focusing now on how computers change the way music is created, performed, and distributed.

Todd Rundgren: I want to distinguish between the technology itself and how it affects the production of music. The most significant contemporary musical concept is the idea of sampling, or recontextualized music. For me, one of the seminal moments in that movement is M.C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This," because he took somebody else's song and wrote his own song over the top of it, and it became more popular than the original song. From the standpoint of the culture and of economics, it totally validated recontextualized music. And after that, it happens constantly now.

Puff Daddy takes a Police song and writes a tribute to his dead rap friend, and it becomes a whole new song more popular than the original. "Every Breath You Take" was a fairly popular song. Puff Daddy's version became one of the top five sellers in the entire world for last year. So recontextualized music sometimes gains a completely new life, one that may overshadow the original musical source. And that's different That's a change in musical concepts.

In the seventies and eighties your music was more reactive, at times even very much like headphone music. But then with No World Order and The Individualist it's become more interactive.

Todd Rundgren: The effect of the technology on music changed my thinking. There was a time when I thought that music is only supposed to sound and to be presented and performed in a certain way. After working with a lot of artists in production, I realized that these are often arbitrary decisions, because you're too tired to go on. I mean, you could go on altering it forever, but at some point you're just got to put the damn record out. Once you're done that, you've as much as admitted that musical decisions are arbitrary, that as much as you try and represent it as being the best or the only way it could be done, you've made an arbitrary decision about what it was. If you understand the mechanisms involved, there's nothing that was simultaneously more pleasing to them and also retained acceptable musical viability for me.

In other words, can someone who likes "Can We Still Be Friends?" or "Hello It's Me" could basically with No World Order make a whole album that's musically and melodically consistent with that song.

Todd Rundgren: Presumably -- they could say, "Hey, I just don't like any of this fast and hard stuff. I only want ballads." Previously, you couldn't tell the CD, "OK, Play some of the music but not other parts of the music," unless you wanted to manually program it. And even then there was only a certain level of granularity you could get to. You couldn't say, "Well, play me only the choruses and no verses." That was when I first jumped headfirst in the merging of technology with music.

Is your subscription service a by-product of this?

Todd Rundgren: The subscription thing is another factor. The first thing that I seriously got into was this idea of interactive music. At that time people were beginning to let go of preconceptions about how music was supposed to sound, you know, the verse-chorus-verse-chorus thing. Structural elements of music were breaking down in public consciousness and for musicians as well.

People were more willing to do this complete recontextualized music. And I asked myself, "What if you could give the listener control over this process?" Allow them to do the recontextualizing on the fly. And that was No World Order, in which I recorded all the music in for bar chunks. You actually had sort of a description of how the music was supposed to be played, but you could modulate that description in real time.

Does the subscription service mean that you are becoming your own label?

Todd Rundgren: Well, that's the real direction I'm probably headed. It doesn't mean I won't have relationships with record labels for the sake of distributing to the conventional market. But the subscription idea is a way for artists to get their basic underwriting -- to insure that they can produce and that they are producing for a particularly interested audience, their core audience.

Are you talking about working with Waking Dreams or PatroNet?

Todd Rundgren: Waking Dreams is a company name. The actual service is called PatroNet, and that's something we're developing with an eye to providing this set of services to any artists who wants to try and do what I'm doing, which is to utilize the Internet to go to your core audience. Offer them the opportunity to underwrite your records, because usually your core audience buys any records you put out. Then, if you don't turn them off too badly, they may buy another one after that.

How has it been going with the TRI (Todd Rundgren Interactive) subscription so far?

Todd Rundgren: Well, I haven't taken a dollar from anybody yet, the reason being that I got conceptually ahead of the technology again and discovered that I couldn't, utilizing the existing technology, deliver the experience I was hyping to people. I had to pull back and do some technological development to make that difference. So I've spent about six months building my own tuner. It's not a browser, because it connects you directly to my stuff and my life content. It connects subscribers together kind of like a little AOL; it's a little proprietary domain. So there's software that I had to design and build to enable this to happen.

Shifting gears... For someone who was so antidrug at first, it's interesting that mind-altering substances opened things up for you. Why did you try it? Was it a controlled experiment? How did it change things for you?

Todd Rundgren: All my initial drug experiences were controlled experiments. I don't say, "Oh, what's that? I'll take anything." I usually know why and what for. It's a plan that has nothing to do with drugs. It has to do with your predisposition to alter your consciousness. And people do it in any number of ways. I have my own walking meditation that sometimes it's very hard to get me out of. It doesn't involve any drugs that I put inside my body. In that sense, it's more about a predilection to take proactive control of the evolution of your mental process.

A lot of people, particularly as they get older, want to settle into a so-called belief system because that means you have less questions to answer. But I'm not afraid to reevaluate an attitude I might have had my whole life and suddenly realize that this is no longer viable for me or that I continued to believe something simply for the comfort factor. I don't mind the discomfort in the long run. If you're not willing to shake yourself out of your comfortable mental state, you might never gain the necessary insights to grow and to move on. Sometimes you need a little external stimulus to make it happen. So, to me the drugs are all about the objective. Why are you doing it?

When you released albums at the time that you started using drugs for stimulus, albums like Something/Anything?, A Wizard, A True Star -- even Initiation -- was it just a matter that you were putting musically what was going on inside of you, or did you want to take the listeners on a journey as well?

Todd Rundgren: I'm much more concerned with trying to represent something that has occurred to me rather than playing up to the expectations of the audience. I do have that skill, and I may utilize it, for instance, if someone asks me to do that on their record. I will put myself in the position of a fairly sophisticated listener and respond as a listener and suggest changes based on my understanding as a listener.

What are your ideas concerning personal belief systems? Do you think about your own spirituality? Do these ideas affect you creatively?

Todd Rundgren: These are all very charged terms that I once used freely but that I use with a lot more deliberation nowadays. As life goes on, I see these less and less as distinct categories of personal thought or behavior. I look at life as inherently spiritual. I look at it as inherently material. It's inherently a lot of complicated things. Yet, the roots of that complexity are inherently simple. I believe in some kind of unified field theory. Put it that way.

Many people have a hard time seeing this inherent simplicity. Do you think this is because they have been conditioned to fear the easy path?

Todd Rundgren: People are never skeptical enough. People believe things too easily. They would like to say that's because they were fooled or duped or gullible, but really most of what people believe is just whatever they find most comfortable. They don't want to believe something that's hard to believe. And what's the spirituality in that? I believe so much in the continuity of things that to see things as being separately spiritual... There was a time when I did. There was a time when I was coming from a point of ignorance where I thought, "Oh, I have to learn how to heal people. I have to learn how to be Carlos Castaneda, to imagine myself being a bird flying around. I have to do this; I have to do that." You don't have to do dick. All you have to do is stop resisting. Stop thinking you know better.

Do you think that if you work it out for yourself that maybe just by your own actions, subconsciously it spread it out to others?

Todd Rundgren: Well, you have to care in the first place. People are must impressed with the concept of the word made flesh. I'm not a particularly biblically-oriented person, but this concept makes sense to me in that -- sure you've got this book full of stuff that tells you how you're supposed to live, but until you see somebody who's actually able to do that, it's just a bunch of words. And once you see somebody who does that, you realize how wrong the book is; you realize that it wasn't a book waiting around for a savior to enliven it.

It's like when you buy some relatively complicated piece of equipment, like say, a stereo. And what is that paperwork that comes in there? You don't give a shit about the paperwork. You want to hear the stereo. And in that sense, there's something inherently evil in people who hold the world up to the standard of the Bible, or King James' interpretation of that, and yet in their lives they are so far away from that. They are on the other side of the universe from that book, let alone becoming the word made flesh.

To me, it isn't about the description of how you're supposed to behave. It's really about the moment-to-moment effect of performance. Like in going out on the road, the only thing that keeps it viable for me, and the thing that's unique about performance, is that you can't stop in the middle. No matter how you feel about it, once you start, you do it. It's the same thing in sports. Once the game starts, your head has to be there in it. That's what makes these people extraordinary. That's what gets them paid these millions of dollars a year, and most people don't realize it. They call it this oblique thing like "Talent": "Oh, they've just got the talent." Man, it ain't talent. Inside them they are in a space that you have not cared enough to get to.

On some of your albums, such as Healing, there's a sense of an emotional effect without bringing up any specific religion.

Todd Rundgren: Right. In the end, that's what's supposed to happen. You're not supposed to be constantly calling on God for validation of your actions. I mean, if you're godly, people will just fuckin' see it. You don't have to say "God told me to do this" or "God is on my side" or "here's my patron saint with his hand up my ass making me do everything." You don't have to make mention of it. That's the problem with religion and spirituality: it's considered a separate thing from the rest of everyday life.

Was Nearly Human a conscious attempt to bring out that sort of emotional effect?

Todd Rundgren: The objectives when I was making it were about the unifying consciousness that music can have at some point. Given that the process had gotten so far away from the performance, a lot of records were done where individual musicians would come in and labor over their part, and the next guy would come in and labor over his part. You wouldn't know what you had until they had individually completed their parts. Nearly Human was an attempt to create that sort of spirit where you get everyone on the same page and in the same moment.

That indeed was the objective: to achieve a heightened sense of consciousness collectively. And, parenthetically, but the time we got to that, most of us were taking some kind of drugs. We'd go all day long learning the songs, and then we'd do take after take at the end of the day. But at the last half hour everyone would do whatever it is they felt like doing to liberate themselves from the process and just go directly into the "living the music" part. And most of the performances on the records are from those final takes when everyone was pretty much flyin' in the same direction.

Obviously, then, it works.

Todd Rundgren: It can work. Everybody did something they didn't care to. Everybody did different things. And the range of drugs was only alcohol and marijuana. There was no cocaine involved. You can't sing with that stuff. It was a definite factor.

Do you practice yoga?

Todd Rundgren: No, I don't. I think there was one point in which I experimented with it or dabbled in it, but it's just currently not in my nature. I go for something a little more proactive and physical. I walk, hike, climb mountains, mow the lawn for four or five hours at a time. And this is how I meditate. I just kind of disconnect from outside influences. I try and get as close to nature as I can, and let my mind go.