The S&V Interview

What better way to revive The S&V Interview than reconvene it by talking with the wizard and true star himself, Todd Rundgren? Recently, I got on Zoom with Todd — who was then-ensconced in his home/studio compound in Hawaii — to discuss his rich recorded legacy, as well as his aptly titled “Damned If I Do” summer tour, which just got underway last night (June 11, 2026) in St. Charles, Illinois, and runs through July 19, 2026.

(For all the tour dates and ticketing info, go here. Rundgren’s top-shelf “Damned If I Do” band includes longtime bandmates bassist Kasim Sulton and drummer Prairie Prince in addition to keyboardist Gil Assayas, guitarist Bruce McDaniel, and horns master Bobby Strickland.)

I asked Rundgren how he’s been able to choose from his deep, six-decades-and-counting catalog for a tour such as this one. (On the first night, the “Damned” band played 27 songs, all told.) “At this particular point, it’s hard to figure out what audience expectations are — and it’s not a stable target anyway,” he admitted. “Perhaps it’s kinda been moving with the general tenor of the country. Sometimes people feel good, and sometimes people don’t feel so good, you know? Either way, it was time to come up with another show.”

And thus, here we are.

Todd and I had so much to talk about, in fact, that Part 2 of our extensive interview will appear over on our sister site, Analog Planet, early next week. For the here and now, though, in Part 1 on S&V, Rundgren, 77, and I discuss the “Damned If I Do” summer tour, mixing in Atmos, and the joys and pitfalls of mixing for vinyl. Ever since I was a tiny boy / I don’t want no candy / I don’t need no toy. . .

Mike Mettler: I know you’re in your “touring headspace” right now, but is it fair to say that you already have an idea for your next studio album, or are you still in the process of figuring it out?
Todd Rundgren: Well, I do know about the record that I’m going to do next. I started working on it. For me, it’s an odd process, because so much of it takes place in my subconscious. I think about it, and I look for things that I think will work in the context of the project.

For instance, if I’m writing a song, I record all the music first, and the lyrics and the melody are the very last things that go on it. By that time, I’ve been so steeped in it — whatever it is — that it only takes me like 20 minutes to write all the lyrics and maybe another 20 minutes to sing it, and then it’s done.

That’s usually the part most people torture [themselves] over — trying to come up with lyrics and melodies, and things like that. But I’ve discovered, over time, that my subconscious does a better job of being original (laughs) than me trying to approach it somehow logically. It’s just if I can find enough solitude to allow that quiet voice to start speaking a little bit louder, that’s when I start to get inspired.

Mettler: Yeah, I get it. It’s that old tortured artist effect. Gee, if only you could name an album after that concept. . .
Rundgren: (laughs) Yeah, Exactly! [We are referring to, of course, Rundgren’s December 1982 LP on Bearsville, The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect. Side 2 of that album features one of his most popular songs, “Bang the Drum All Day,” which has long since become an audience-participation favorite during Rundgren’s live shows. Good news: It’s also part of his current “Damned If I Do” set.]

Mettler: Speaking of vinyl again, do you listen to test pressings and make QC decisions? Like you hear stuff and you go, “Hey, the dB level is too loud,” or something like that? Do you get that technical about it?
Rundgren: Well, back in the day when I was producing three, four records a year, I spent a lot of time in the mastering studio. Eventually, you develop a certain kind of relationship or understanding with the guy — the engineer who actually does the work. Often, you’re only there because it’s the first time you’re hearing it on the most perfectly referenced speakers, and you’re looking for things that you haven’t heard before.

But in terms of the process, the engineers I work with, like Greg Calbi — they are the best masterers in the world, and they’ll be looking for things I may be completely unaware of. Their experience is that they’ve done thousands and thousands of records, whereas I may have mastered a couple dozen records.

Mettler: I get it. But still, you know what you want to hear. Can you remember any of those mastering sessions that came out exactly as you thought — something that you heard in your head that came out exactly how you wanted to hear it on vinyl?
Rundgren: Well, see, that was always the problem with vinyl. Vinyl is, from the moment you put something on — it’s already degraded, and it will never capture the full range that’s on the tape to start with. And the full range goes above and beyond your ability to hear it (chuckles), so you don’t bother to try and get it on there.

The other problem is that, on the outside of a vinyl disc, you have about a yard of area every time it turns around — you know, for what the sound is. As you get closer to the center, you’ve got about half of that — which means you’ve got about half the potential fidelity by the time you get to the center of the record! (chuckles again)

Mettler: Right, and then you have to start thinking about things like, “Okay, now I gotta compromise the bass here,” or “I gotta take some tracks off of this one.” There are lots of compromises you then have to consider.
Rundgren: (nods) All kinds of compromises you have to make that, in the end, won’t solve the problems that vinyl has inherently, because it’s still half the amount of real estate at the end of the record as there was at the beginning.

Also, the way the records are cut is not the way most people play them. The cutting head is going perpendicular to the center of the record. Most people are using a tonearm that, as it moves towards the center, is going at an angle. It’s turning at an angle so that the stylus is sitting in the groove at an angle, so as the record goes further and further along, the stereo is collapsing towards the center as well!

There are all kinds of things wrong with vinyl. I kind of celebrated when CDs came out — even though other people, because it was reproducing frequencies they’d never heard before, considered it to be brittle, and stuff like that.

Mettler: See, I’m in both camps. I love vinyl and analog for certain things, and I love digital and 360-degree mixes for certain other things. And if the surround mixes are done right, I feel like you can be in the middle of a listening experience that’s natural, and not fake. You’ve done a few surround sound and Atmos mixes yourself.

Rundgren: I haven’t done many Atmos mixes — but the song that I remixed by The Call, “The Walls Came Down,” is available in Atmos. [Note: Todd’s Atmos mix of “The Walls Came Down” can be accessed via Apple Music. His own version of “Walls” is also in the current “Damned If I Do” tour setlist.]

Mettler: Yeah, and it’s a great mix too. And a few good years back, you did a 5.1 mix for Liars, which was on DVD-Audio [via Silverline, in 2004]. We talked about that mix back in the day at a CES in Las Vegas, I think.
Rundgren: Yeah, that’s right. It was a fun project to do, and it kinda pointed at the potential. But the problem was, at the time, nobody had a surround system except in their car. The only place you found a 5.1 surround system was in an automobile, because they wouldn’t set them up in their house. And it’s a tricky thing anyway, because most people have a hard time getting two speakers in phase! (both laugh)

Mettler: I’ve always been the kind of guy who figured out how to set up a surround system at home, and I love switching between stereo, 5.1, and Atmos because I love all those formats. But speaking of Atmos, would you even be able to go back to the original tapes of — oh, we’ll just pick the Something/Anything? record [Rundgren’s acclaimed February 1972 2LP set on Bearsville], which has such a breadth of interesting tones and textures that an Atmos mix of something like that album could be interesting to revisit if you have the original tapes to access. Would that even be possible?
Rundgren: I don’t know if that whole album exists, or what condition the tapes would be in. There’s what they call “sticky-shed disease” [a.k.a. Sticky-Shed Syndrome, or SSS], and there was a certain formula that, during the “boom” of records being made, most records were on this kind of tape. It was found that if you stored the tape for a long time, the oxide — you know, the magnetic part — would start falling off of the tape.

Mettler: Something like that almost happened to [Queen’s mega 1975 hit single] “Bohemian Rhapsody,” right? They almost lost it entirely, since they were doing so many passes with the same tape.
Rundgren: Yeah; they had to save it. And you have to go through this weird process of baking the tapes in a convection oven, or something like that. Once you do that, you have to quickly transfer them to another medium because it will go bad again — quicker than the first time.

Mettler: When you first started recording back in the Nazz days, you had to figure out how to do both mono and stereo mixes.
Rundgren: (nods) Now I’m trying to remember the very first machine that I had, because I discovered how to do something by accident. In those days — which is like the late ’60s, or something like that — the full technological revolution hadn’t taken hold and it was always cheaper to do a mono session, so all of our demo sessions that we would do for the labels would all be in mono.

I took one of the tapes from the demo sessions and I said, “Well, maybe I could turn this into stereo.” So, I recorded it once on one track, and then I tried to sync it up and record it on the other track as well. I did the mono thing twice, because I thought maybe that’ll sound like stereo.

But the end result actually was that flanging effect you’ve heard on songs like [Small Faces’ Top 20 1967 single] “Itchycoo Park”— that “jet plane” sound thing. And when I heard that, I said, “Wow! That’s great.” We made the engineer who recorded “Open My Eyes” [most likely Michael Friedman] figure out how to do it, so that was the first time that we did that. The end chord, and the repeat chords, all had flanging on them. That was one of the first times I ever did a hands-on thing with a tape machine. [“Open My Eyes” is the opening track on the self-titled Nazz LP, which was released in October 1968 on SGC.]

Mettler: Playing with tape recorders before you really knew what you could do with them was always fun as a kid. I remember trying to figure out where to put my big, dictation-size tape recorder in front of my speakers — both of which, at that time, I had up on concrete blocks in my room! — so I could record what came out of them in such a way that songs would sound just like they did on the radio. Not sure I ever figured it out back then, though. (laughter)
Rundgren: I was fortunate that I had a best friend that I spent a lot of time with, and he had a tape recorder. Before I was even doing demos in studios for record labels, we were playing around with it. The most fun thing to do with it was to record your voice on low speed — and then turn it up to double speed, just to hear your voice sound like Alvin and The Chipmunks, you know? (more laughter)

Want more Todd talk? Go here for Mettler and Rundgren talking about the artist’s then-new album Global, as well as additional vinyl-related matters, in a story that posted on December 23, 2015.]