Todd Rundgren has a wealth of legendary songs of his own that have powered his career through many decades. But if it hadn’t been for important inspirations like songwriter and producer Burt Bacharach, his path might have been different.
“I was a teenager in my junior high school years, I guess it was, and the Beatles sort of became everything. I didn’t pay much attention to who the composers were of the songs,” he tells the UCR Podcast. “And then ‘Walk on By’ came out. I really liked the song. It had this whole spooky thing and a different kind of sensibility from your typical pop song. So I bought the Dionne Warwick album that contained that song. Right there with my Beatles albums and everything else, it became one of my regular listens.”
Listen to Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk on By’
“That’s when I became aware of Burt Bacharach as a songwriter and he was also the producer of the record. I also started paying more attention to who was writing the songs, even if it wasn’t [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney. So that’s when I got interested in the work,” he explains. “We didn’t have a piano in the house, so when I was in high school, I used to spend after hours in the auditorium, just fooling around on the piano. I discovered my hands and ears tended to go towards those major and minor sevens, the more sophisticated chords that you’d find in a Bacharach song. I realized there was a subconscious influence going on, just from having listened to that Dionne Warwick album so many times. Of course as the years went by and I became more of a serious songwriter, that influence [is still] somewhere in the mix.”
Rundgren is currently taking a deeper dive into Bacharach’s work as part of the tour called What the World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook. It’s an outing which he acknowledges has presented him with some challenges. “Burt rarely wrote the lyrics and I don’t know what, exactly the process would be like,” he admits. “You know, whether Hal David would show up with a song, poem, or something like that, and Burt would put it to music. Maybe more likely, Burt had some musical ideas, and then the lyricist would would try and find something that that went along with it.”
He cites “God Give Me Strength,” Bacharach’s collaboration with Elvis Costello, as one example. “I have the responsibility of singing [that] and it’s [clear] that those are Elvis Costello lyrics,” he points out. “It’s that combination of self-pity and anger that [is a] thread through all of Elvis Costello’s lyrics. So I guess Burt is kind of the stable foundation for these things. And then it’s up to the lyricist to paint the picture to which the soundtrack already exists.”
Bacharach Was Apparently a Rundgren Fan
There’s an anecdote that the legendary songwriter and producer came to see Rundgren perform live because he wanted to hear “Hello, it’s Me” live. Unfortunately, that song wasn’t in the set list that particular night and the pair didn’t meet. “I never got to talk to him about exactly why he was there,” he says now. “So I can only make some assumptions. I never had the opportunity to see him in concert, but you know, that’s a different experience. I imagine the audience for a Burt Bacharach concert has a certain amount of deference and reverence for him. They know he’s not a singer, but he’s going to sing anyway. We won’t have the advantage of that [with this current tour]. We’ve got to stand up on our own. I think there will be people there to enjoy it and people [also wondering] how well we’ll capture it. He’s the kind of artist that if you get into him and you get into his songs, you don’t want to hear them screwed with too badly.”
Early reviews suggest that the late Bacharach’s music is in good hands. His former music director and arranger Rob Shirakbari is at the helm, helping to oversee the nine-piece all-star ensemble featuring Rundgren, his Utopia bandmate Kasim Sulton and vocalist Wendy Moten and others. The 22-date tour began with three California shows and will run through Ft. Lauderdale on April 23.
Watch Todd Rundgren Sing Burt Bacharach’s Music
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Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci