11. Todd RundgrenA Wizard, A True Star
One of the best blue-eyed soul voices ever. Famously he didn’t do drugs in the ’60s and made up for it in the ’70s. My girlfriend gave me a book about how he recorded each album, it’s incredibly detailed. For this record, he got a studio together in New York and got a load of musicians together to make the record. At no point did he play any of the session players any vocals – they heard bits of music but they had no clear picture of what the actual song would be like. He had a total vision and he didn’t want to deviate from that with anyone else’s opinion. People talk about records that go from jazz to prog to psych to vaudeville in one track and that’s Todd. A proper studio head who could write hooks and songs in an almost Brill Building way. My favourite story about Todd is that he lives in Hawaii and one side of his house doesn’t have a wall. He said about it, "Lots of things come in. Animals, super-fans, stalkers, the weather."
