Todd Rundgren will release a new album, Space Force, on October 14th. Like his last one, 2017's White Knight, it features a number of special guests.
Among those joining him this time are Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen, The Roots, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, Sparks, Steve Vai, Thomas Dolby, Neil Finn of Crowded House and Fleetwood Mac, and Adrian Belew, who is featured on the album's first single, "Puzzle."
What sets Space Force apart from White Knight is that instead of writing the songs, he asked his special guests to share ideas for songs they started but had not finished.
"My role is less of like a grand conceptualist and more like an art restorer in some cases," says Rundgren in Variety.
"There are certainly conventional collaborations, where someone would give me an idea and I would have as much to contribute as was in the original idea, but then there are other extremes in which, for instance, someone had a demo that might have been three-quarters of the way toward completion and then something happened to cause it to never be finished. And that was what I solicited from other people. So essentially the concept is more finding orphan material and rehabilitating it....
"One of the reasons why I’d decided that I wanted to do more collaborating was because all of my previous records were just all me. The subject matter was whatever I thought up, and the singing was all me, and the overarching concept would be mine. And I started to think that I was in an echo chamber, essentially — that I’m not getting enough external input, which causes you to potentially stagnate. One of the reasons why I did White Knight was to force myself into opening up the process to others, but I had only done it halfway because I was still coming up with almost all of the material. So I thought, let’s go the next step. Let’s start using other people’s song ideas as the basis of of where the music should go."
Rundgren will be back on the road October 1st with Daryl Hall in Brookville, New York, and then he starts the Celebrating David Bowie tour with Adrian Belew on October 6th in San Diego.