An Interview with Todd Rundgren (6/95)
(from the digital press kit created for the TR-i Expo on 6/12)

1) What is the meaning of "The Individualist"?

The title of the project is "The Individualist" and it makes reference to 
what has become the relentless message of my music in recent years, which 
is that change in the world emanates from the inside out (not from the 
outside in), and therefore the highest calling that one can have is to 
understand oneself particularly in relationship to consensus reality.

 2) How about the single "If Not Now, When"?

The first single is called "If Not Now, When" and it was written in the 
closing days of this project, which was after the 1994 November 
elections;  and as the winners were trumpeting their grand victory, 
I was reflecting on the fact that most people didn't even vote, and that 
in a lot of places in the world it's an actual danger to go out and 
participate in your government, and I was kind of a little disgusted by 
the fact that most Americans don't feel motivated to express themselves 
in that way.

 3) What is CD+?

CD+ is kind of an extended music CD format in that any unused space that 
isn't taken up by music can be committed to other types of data, in 
particular computer data, and the record industry has kind of jumped on 
this as a new standard for presenting additional content to people along 
with the regular CD.  You can stick it into a CD player, and it looks the 
same and plays the same, but you can also stick it into a computer with a 
CD-ROM drive, and you'll be able to read any computer data that happens 
to be on there.

 4) Is "The Individualist" an interactive music CD?

"The Individualist" is technically not an interactive music CD, at least 

as I identify one, because it doesn't allow you to really change the 
experience of the music itself.  You can have some visual
accompaniment to the music, and you can change the order in which the 
songs play, but that kind of thing is available in the form of videos and 
things like that.  The difference here is that we package it along with 
the disc, and also give people some other kind of interactive experiences 
that don't necessarily have to do with changing the music.

 5) What is the "plus" in your CD+?

The additional content on "The Individualist" includes the following.  
There is a visual accompaniment to every song that's on the record.  You 
can choose which songs to play or you can watch the whole thing, which 
will come to something like an hour's worth of visual content.  There's 
also an interactive lyric section where you can see the lyrics 
highlighted as the music plays, or you can click on a portion of the 
lyrics and it'll jump to that part of the music.  And also we've got a 
little video editing trick that we do where you can actually call a 
four-camera shoot that was done at London's Palladium last year during 
the interactive tour so you can actually be the director of your own TR-i 
video.

 6) Why is there no biographical content?

I've kind of shied away from the biographical content  for a couple of 
reasons.  One is I don't find it particularly interesting, and also I 
think that it's a mistake to think that the audience will continue to 
come back for more biographical information.   I think this additional 
content area should be used to further convey your message or articulate 
it in other ways, and that's probably what I'll continue to do with any 
CD+ projects that I'm involved in.

 7) Why are you releasing the CD+ through Ion instead of a traditional 
music label?

We've decided to release "The Individualist" through a multimedia label 
rather than a traditional record label because we don't feel that the 
record companies quite understand this area yet, even though they're 
striving to.  Also, it's been harder and harder to get the attention of 
record companies to do things the way  I like to do them, which is first 
of all to focus on the content (less on the personality aspect), and also 
to be a little flexible with the way music is applied -- that has a lot 
to do with my interactive music experiments, and things like that.  So, 
in order to give myself the most freedom in terms of where I wanted to go 
with the content, and also how we might most effectively get it into 
computer stores as well as record stores, we decided to go with Ion, 
which is a multimedia label that also is distributed by a record label, 
so we get the best of both worlds.

 8) How are you getting the music to the traditional outlets like radio? 
Marketing the record outside of traditional channels does present some 
challenges, and in particular there is the problem of getting the record 
to the traditional outlets like radio (things like that) and to the 
Press, and we've had some fortunate things happen in that regard in that 
"The Album Network", one of the major radio tipsheets in the country, has 
shown such interest in this concept that they've decided to service the 
single to all of their affiliates.  In that sense, we've got all of the 
pieces that we would normally get from the record company but we had to 
put them together kind of off the shelf.

 9) Why aren't you charging extra for the additional content?

We had a lot of discussions about how much we should charge for this 
disc.  There is the precedent of what a CD+ should cost, and what the 
perceived value of it is to the audience at large, and we decided that at 
this point in time rather than get into those greater issues, we would 
just include the content and not actually charge for it.  That way we can 
kind of see what the audience reaction to it is without making a 
commitment in terms of pricing in the future because we don't know how 
much it's going to cost to produce more of this stuff.  But for the time 
being, we'd like people to just experience it and not have to do the 
arithmetic in their head about whether it's worth it or not.

10) How are you supporting the release tour-wise?

I am touring behind "The Individualist" but in a chameleon-like move that 
is not unexpected, this will be a more conventional and traditional band 
tour, not necessarily conventional because I think the musicianship is so 
superlative, but we discovered that the interactive tour limited the 
number of places we could go.  It had a particular kind of requirement in 
terms of the venue, and because it was such a new thing a lot of 
promoters were a little shy of it, so we decided we would play every 
place that we possibly could play, big and small, high and low, and to do 
that I decided to just put together a kind of compact "hit and run" band, 
and we'll be hitting and running all across the world.

11) What is the future of this technology?

Disc-based formats I think everyone in the industry has come to the 
consensus that they are a temporary solution because they are a limited 
domain of information, and I'd like to be able to put my entire catalog 
in people's hands, not just little bits of it.  So, in the long run, 
delivery of content will be a point-to-point affair.  In other words, if 
I wake up in the morning and have a new song and I want people to hear 
it, I can record it into my data space and through the miracle of 
connectivity people can be listening to that music tonight.  Not only 
that, if I decide I want to change it tomorrow, I can do so and people 
can hear the results of that change.  So, I look forward to a day when 
music becomes less of this long, drawn out, crystalline, episodic 
expression, and something that's more of a day-to-day, plastic, 
synthetic, and really vital process in which it's from my lips to your 
ears with as little delay as possible.

12) Will "The Individualist" become a real interactive music experience?

Even though "The Individualist" is not technically an interactive music 
album, at least by my definition, that doesn't mean that we've given up 
on interactive music.  Nay, we're pressing ahead on all fronts there and 
within the year there'll be new interactive music discs, including "The 
Individualist", and there'll also be on-line interactive music services 
-- for instance, on the Time Warner Full Service Network, and possibly 
through the Internet, and CompuServe, and other ways that people get 
connected to all of the new digital data.

13) Are other artists becoming interested in interactive music?

What started out essentially as ambivalence toward the concept of 
interactive music has become a topic of great interest I think amongst 
artists in the musical community, and in some ways this technology is 
ideal for the kind of music that certain artists make.

14) Where did this TR-i Expo thing come from?

By some grand coincidence a lot of the projects we've been working on, 
sometimes for years, are all coming to a head in this time period, and I 
realize that there are a lot of different people who want to talk about 
the various aspects, and if I committed the necessary time to do that in 
the traditional linear fashion, I'd probably never get to complete any of 
the things I was working on.  So, we devised kind of as a little 
sarcastic joke, this idea of a TR-i Expo in which I and all of the 
people, the corporate and individual partners that I'm working with, 
would get together and put on this little "trade show" that explained to 
the Press and the public at large exactly what I'm involved in on all 
these different levels.

15) Can the public participate in this event?

Although TR-i Expo is meant essentially as a way to satisfy the curiosity 
of the Press, there'll be some parts of the event that will be accessible 
to the public, particularly if you happen to be connected on-line.  We're 
going to be doing some Internet-based interview segments with the world 
Press that people can listen in on and probably (if they're clever 
enough) inject a question or two. 

16) How can you accomplish all these things at once?

Some people might assume that I take stimulants or something in order to 
complete all of these works, but obviously I don't do it all myself.  
There are a lot of other people involved, and I've become kind of the 
focus for these things, and I give direction to them, but in the way that 
I produce records I try and encourage people (within the confines of the 
job description) to express themselves.  In that sense, particularly the 
CD+ project involves the work of not only myself but of other people that 
I've worked with for quite a while.  This work doesn't happen in my 
solitary vacuum; there are a lot of other people involved.

17) How does an artist maintain a relationship with a corporation?

Being as fiercely independent as I am, it's kind of unusual to see my 
name associated with so many corporations, but a lot of these 
relationships have evolved organically, and in most cases out of some 
application of tools to entertainment and artistic content, and sometimes 
it applies to the content itself.

18) What's it like being a radio DJ?

Now that I've been a radio DJ for some six months or so, I'm starting to 
get comfortable with it.  I suppose the most peculiar thing about it was 
that I was suddenly in control of a medium that I had so much trouble 
getting my own music exposed on, and now I was able to be a filter for 
listeners and try and bring them music that I appreciated, as well as 
music that was new and that I was learning about.  So I suppose the 
oddest thing that happens now that I'm on every record label's mailing 
list is that they're beseeching me, a radio DJ, to play their music 
instead of what was traditionally the other way around -- me, somehow 
beseeching radio DJ's to play my music.

19) Is radio a throwback technology?

It's kind of unusual for me to get involved in a technology that seems so 
seasoned and mature as radio is, but like all things in this new age, I 
believe that radio is undergoing a transformation and will become 
something slightly different and mutated, but more responsive to what the 
listeners want to hear.  In that sense, I don't see this as some kind of 
retro-groove that I'm stuck in, being a radio DJ.  I think that I have an 
awareness of what's possible, and that as things change we'll be the 
first to take advantage of them.

20) Could you return to a life without modern technology?

Although a life without technology might be hard to imagine, I've got a 
thing about nature;  I like to get next to nature and solidify my 
relationship with nature, so I think that even if all the technology that 
I use nowadays were to disappear, I would find ways to make up for it in 
terms of the quality of life.  I'm not fearful of technology, at the same 
time I don't grow dependent on it either, and I think that in the coming 
years people will begin to start to appreciate the simple life that 
technology is supposed to give you the additional time to enjoy.