ON THE RECORD

Away from Utopia, Todd Rundgren built a formidable solo career built on transcendence and transformation with work equally ambitious, idiosyncratic and deeply personal. More often than not with his solo work, Rundgren could be counted upon delivering his own share of consummately conceived power-pop miniatures. Rundgren pulls back the curtain to discuss the inspiration behind five pop-infused gems.

“I Saw the Light”

By the time I got to the actual work of doing , in those days I didn’t have a studio of my own, so I had to write outside the studio and essentially record in more or less a conventional way. I had a couple of songs done for the record, and I certainly had enough songs to get, I didn’t know that it was gonna turn out to be a double album. The stuff started coming out, and when it stopped (laughs), there was a double album. I got into this sort of almost a habit of songwriting that as that particular era was coming to a head, a lot of songs used the basic patterns of major seventh chords ascending and descending. By the time I sat down to write “I Saw the Light,” I just had this little grain of an idea and 20 minutes later the song, words and all was finished. (laughs) It just kind of spurted out because things were becoming a bit habitual. For me, I had an aversion to the real flat sort of chords unless you were doing them on a loud guitar, just playing triads and things like that didn’t appeal to me as much on the piano. I like a lot of suspensions. As for the guitar solo, I have no idea what inspired it. It just came out. I knew I had to have a solo and the first part was easy because that was just the melody of the song, but the second half of it I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking at the time but it was all done in the studio. I hadn’t worked it out beforehand. I just started messing with some ideas, and that’s what I came up with. It’s a little bit of The Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” I guess, but the exact influence on it I can’t tell you.