YMMV / Todd Rundgren

• Archive Panic: See all that on the main page? And if you want to get into everything he's produced as well as his solo/Utopia recordings, good luck. (It's worth noting that he's been known to finish unfinished songs for the artists he's produced, but refuse a writer's credit for doing so.)
• Awesome Music: Lots of it, with Something/Anything? and A Wizard, a True Star being the most frequently cited contenders for best album.
  • The Beatles parodies on Utopia's Deface the Music are such effective pastiches that the track "I Just Want to Touch You" was rejected for inclusion on the soundtrack to the film Roadie because the filmmakers were afraid of getting sued for plagiarism.
  • Progressive Rock fans should make sure to check out Todd, Initiation, Todd Rundgren's Utopia, Another Live, and Ra.
  • Even in just a featured role, Todd provides guitar heroics up and down Bat Out of Hell.
  • "Bang on the Drum." It's not Fun Personified so much as pure, primal adrenaline distilled into awesome rock n roll.
  • Healing is basically what you get if you cross Progressive Rock with Synth-Pop and, if you can get past the '80s synths, it is beautiful.
  • A Cappella was produced entirely with Rundgren's voice, although it is often electronically processed to make it sound like musical and percussion instruments. It's absolutely astonishing that one person can produce such a rich variety of sound. The accompanying tour, a recording of which was released as A Cappella Tour, has Rundgren revisiting much of his earlier material with an accompanying choir, and is similarly beautiful.
  • Arena and Nearly Human have quite their share of great tunes as well. It's actually fairly difficult to believe that Nearly Human was recorded live in the studio, because the performances and arrangements are so sophisticated.
  • State is overall a rather uneven album, but even its weaker parts are still good fun, and the song "Sir Reality" stands out as an all-time career highlight and quite possibly the finest Protest Song Todd has ever written, both because it says more in fewer words than any of his previous protest songs, and also because it's simply one of the most beautiful songs in his entire catalogue.
  • Liars is great from start to finish - almost certainly in his top 10 albums if not top 5. A lot of really catchy songs that are even more resonant now than they were when they were recorded.
• Covered Up: Rundgren did this to his own song. His solo version of "Hello It's Me" is much better known than the Nazz' version (although the Nazz' version was itself a minor hit).
  • "Love Is the Answer" was a bigger hit for England Dan & John Ford Coley than it was for Utopia at the time, though Utopia's version may be better known now.
  • Utopia's version of The Move's "Do Ya" was better known than the original for a time, which led to Jeff Lynne deciding to re-record it with Electric Light Orchestra (which was a More Popular Spin-Off of The Move; Lynne had written "Do Ya"). ELO's version is now by far the most famous version.
• Dead Horse Genre: There is a risk of this with his prog and disco stuff. However, his prog stuff manages to be quite a bit catchier and more tuneful than the works of many other acts in the genre, so some people may find it more accessible and/or less pretentious than typical prog fare. He also usually keeps a sense of humour in his music, which Progressive Rock is sometimes accused of lacking (despite the other obvious counter-examples of Frank Zappa and early Genesis).
• Epic Riff: Again, many of his songs, including the prog stuff (there are several in "The Ikon" alone).
• Fair for Its Day:
  • Some of Rundgren's '70s material can come across this way to modern audiences. For example, the melody, performance, and arrangement of "You Don't Have to Camp Around" make it clear that it's intended to be a light-hearted ribbing, but the lyrics are likely to come across as fairly homophobic to modern audiences. Rundgren's later work generally averts this, although some songs play on the irony of his being a white man singing some sentiments that are rather... strange for a white man to sing (particularly on Liars, where several songs have intended interpretations that are at odds with the sentiments they express on the surface).
  • "We Gotta Get You a Woman" is sometimes called misogynistic because of the line "They may be stupid but they sure are fun", but the lines preceding it are "We better get walkin', we're wastin' time talkin' now. Talkin' 'bout things about that special one." It's not saying that women are stupid, but that men talking about women instead of actually meeting women is fun but pointless.
• Funny Moments: He has many. The Cluster F-Bomb on "Flaw" (sung in a blue-eyed soul style, no less!) is definitely a prime example of this trope.
• Nightmare Fuel: "The Night the Carousel Burnt Down", from Something/Anything?. That ending especially—shivers....
  • The song takes on an even more frightening dimension when taking into account the reactions of the bystanders to the eponymous carousel's destruction— while "the children all cried" due to their innocent outlook on the world, "the old ladies sighed" and "the rest of us lied," implying that humanity is inherently either too cynical or in denial about disasters of our own making, resulting in an overall lack of action, thus leading to the repetition of horrific events.
    • If taken as a metaphor for the bystander effect and/or the climate crisis (whether or not it was intended as either), the song becomes even more chilling.
• Retroactive Recognition: Luther Vandross shows up as a backing vocalist on a few Utopia recordings.
• Seasonal Rot: His output in the nineties is generally regarded as...not very good. His Noughties output is somewhat more warmly regarded, though rarely considered to be as good as his classic material.
• Signature Song: Arguably "Hello It's Me". Also "I Saw the Light", "Can We Still Be Friends?", "We Gotta Get You a Woman", and "Bang the Drum All Day". Utopia's is likely either "Love Is the Answer" or "Set Me Free".
• Tear Jerker: He has quite a few. "Bag Lady", "Bread", "Can We Still Be Friends?", "Honest Work", "Tiny Demons", and "Love Is the Answer" are some particularly obvious examples.
• Values Resonance: Many of his protest songs are even more resonant now than they were when they were written. "Honest Work" tackles the replacement of manual labour with automation, a trend that is more prominent now than it was in The '80s and will continue to become even more so in the future. Meanwhile, Liars' concept of "a paucity of truth" seems depressingly prescient given the fact that many people are bandying about the term "post-truth" in the wake of 2016's political events.
• Win Back the Crowd: After a long period of releasing material that resulted in a Broken Base, Liars received an almost unanimously positive reception.