The Individualist Quotes

“When you have children, you have moved the center of your universe toward them. Whether by conscious desire or instinct, your first thought should be of them. Even if you are not sure about how you feel about your offspring because you have taken the creation of a new life so idly, you are in them; they are the ultimate legacy. To abandon them is to lop off your branch of the tree.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“As I got to know many of the engineers at Apple, I was somewhat amused to discover that almost all of them played an instrument. Of course coders and players would be fascinated and comfortable with the mathematical nature of music. I guess it was more unusual for a successful musician to suddenly commit to learning the alien skill of composing in code, but as the technology penetrated the public consciousness at large it couldn’t help but hook in a few players who would succumb to that, which lured me to music- creating something from nothing.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“My advice to anyone with an unhappy upbringing: get over it.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Marriage can make you different or at least feel different. It can be simple as getting used to referring to your girlfriend as your wife. Some will have a greater sense of security while others will suddenly feel trapped. It may signal the loss of youth or the end of a long quest for happiness. Maybe it’s for the dowry or the keys to the kingdom. If nothing at all changed, what would be the point?”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Michele wound up doing much of the grunt work and I convinced myself she enjoyed it. I had encouraged her to give up her career while I kept mine, rationalizing that I made the money that underwrote our lifestyle. When that became difficult I would become sullen and introverted and refused to share myself.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Money changes everything. There was a brief window when the Internet had some purity; things were there because they were worth knowing.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“I was supposed to speak but wasn’t sure about what, until it dawned on me that this platform would allow a creator to go directly to the audience for funding, rather than being loaned the money by a publisher. I thought it was such a good idea that I was afraid someone might steal it, so I set about trying to implement the concept, calling it PatroNet.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Sometimes it’s hard to trust doctors. It’s like they don’t know what they don’t know.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“We began to suspect that Bebe was trying to make a living off of Liv and decided we should pursue custody. It seemed that much of the voluntary child support we were providing was being diverted to Bebe’s lifestyle and that Liv might become a bargaining chip. Almost the moment we stopped the cash flow Bebe revealed Liv’s true lineage. We demanded a paternity test, knowing what the result would be. Suddenly she was no longer a Rundgren- she was a Tyler (a lot easier to spell, I must admit).”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Most musicians do not play for life. If you’ve written a lot of songs that still get played you might ‘retire’ and live off the royalties, but that would be a small percentage of players. Many will stay in the business but essentially get a desk job like A & R or marketing, but that’s probably a minority as well. That means that a whole bunch of players have had to find other jobs after spending their entire lives learning to do one thing. At least you’re not likely to be replaced by a robot; unless you’re in Kraftwerk.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“We kind of peaked when we opened up the house at 69 Sunshine. The world showed up. There were engineers and CEOs and Francis Coppola in the kid’s room getting a demo of the new Next machine.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Dave came up with the name Flowfazer- he really liked alliteration in his project names; and after a few months, we had a product. We introduced it at MacWorld, intending to publish it ourselves. As it turned out we had some heavily funded competition in Berkeley Systems Flying Toasters, but we did create a splash. The big drunken party at a Mexican restaurant helped a bit. We probably could have made a lot more money if we had ported it to Windows, but we so loathed the platform that neither one of us wanted to make desk space for a cruddy PC.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Bebe had been gone for weeks tagging Aerosmith around Europe so that unfortunate episode in my life seemed to have been rested. Then I got the call. Pregnant again she said. Not Steven she said. Timetable says it’s me. Please can she come “home” she says. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“No one saw commercial success in Meat Loaf’s future, but that was not my motive. I wanted to make a statement about the whimsy of pop music and for some reason, that translated into almost obscene success. If that had not occurred to me I might have turned the project down and this page would not exist.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Everyone saw the same act that I saw, but then nobody saw it the way I saw. In my mind this was the genius spoof of Bruce Springsteen that the world so desperately needed. The hyperbolic lyrics about motorcycles and switchblades, the simple triads of the music, the melodrama, the mysterious Svengali at the piano, all fronted not by a hunky denim clad stud but a 250 pound wild man whose head might explode any second. I was sold.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“A full life is a balance of prudence and foolishness. You are never going to discover anything about the world or yourself through constant conservative prudence. Conversely, endless tomfoolery not only tries your friends’ patience but can tempt disaster with no reward. Choose carefully your flights of fancy and live to enjoy the memory of them.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“I got the impression that Iran and the US were the closest of allies: young men on the street would stop and chat just to practice their English on me. No one every mentioned the Shah’s dreaded secret police, presumably trained by the CIA. When the revolution happened I was stunned at the apparent hatred that the Iranians had for us- we seemed like such good friends a year ago. Grudges are for highschoolers. Smart people settle and move on.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Brian Wilson did do something well before his time- he realized the potential of the studio itself as instrument and the possibilities of recontextualized music; concepts that are very important to me today. So what if he talks out of the side of his mouth and gets a little antsy listening to fusion. Lots of people do.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“One day somebody contacted me to say that Brian Wilson had heard my record and wanted me to come visit him, which I arranged to do. He wasn’t huge or hairy or anything, and he formed fairly comprehensible speech, but he had the attention span of a Chihuahua.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“What exactly does a record producer do? Before George Martin no one ever paid attention to producer credits. That recognition pushed the expectations of a producer into ever more peripatetic realms as shared only by quantum physicists and neurosurgeons. Silk purse to sow’s ear? Easy. Capturing that flittering butterfly of musical genius? You’re guess is as good as anyone’s.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Friendship is often depicted as some kind of Platonic love thing, but often you are not sure why you call somebody a friend. Perhaps it’s common interests, or aversions, or ‘friendly’ competition- but you rarely say that you fell in love with somebody without knowing it. Probably more friendships are based on mutual tolerance than anything else. Sometimes you just don’t want to be alone and will put up with almost anything to avoid it, even while your friend is annoying the shit out of you.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“He introduced me to some of the very strange people he had grown up with, like Andy Kaufman before he started doing whatever that thing that he did was.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“When I heard the news of Paul and Linda, I felt a pang of envy and jealousy. Was I jealous of Paul for snagging a girl who had just weeks before spent an inordinate amount of time with me? Actually, I was envious of Linda who now got to hang with the Beatles.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“The object of life is to learn to love yourself, and the measure of that is how comfortable you are when alone. Yes we are social animals, but our initial instincts at an unfamiliar face are apprehension and fear, driving us inward. Can you hate yourself and still love anything else? Does somebody want to be loved by someone who can’t be alone with themselves? Fear of solitude is fear of self.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Thirty years after I stopped dreaming of Linda, I’m in a hotel room in Tulsa waiting for sound check and the phone rings. “Hi, this is Linda from high school. Do you remember me?” Her voice has an unromantic Philadelphia twang that I hadn’t noticed before. She’s got a few kids and is planning to come to the show, which is on a blocked-off street under a superhighway. I tell her things are chaotic and maybe I’ll look for her and purposefully don’t plan anything. I know that seeing her now, seeing the future I once thought I wanted sketched in cold reality would probably be more depressing than satisfying. If she came, I never saw her. I did not even imagine her.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Just as we were trying to learn Rubber Soul, the Yardbirds released “Shapes Of Things” and the Stones had the first fuzz-tone driven #1 record with Satisfaction and everything began to change.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“It is theorized that music is man imitating the sound of nature, which is all well enough, but does not fully explain some of the weird music that man has come up with. Myself, I can’t find anything natural in a country tune sung by a Yankee from a suburb. But we acclimate and eventually gravitate to the music we experience in our formative years, whatever that turns out to be. Eventually you turn into your dad- ‘That’s not music! Back in my day we had real music’.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“Screw Santa Claus. Why shouldn’t kids know that their parents care enough to try and guarantee them one fucking happy day a year? Even if they do amscray with the money grandma gave them to buy you something cool because the gasman would have wished us a very scary Christmas unless he gets paid immediately. Somebody explain to me the long-term benefit of perpetuating the idea that a stranger is more generous than your own family.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations

“I don’t remember if I was self conscious about my teeth before- my hair was more of a fixation. From that moment on I realized my teeth were going to look stupid and I would look stupid if I didn’t adapt to that fact. Keep your mouth closed when taking pictures. You can smile, just keep your lips closed.”
― Todd Rundgren, The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations