(Credits: Far Out / Todd Rundgren / ABC Television)
Fri 21 November 2025 19:16, UK
It’s perhaps not an obvious fact among his body of work, but Burt Bacharach’s uplifting and universal songbook proved a mammoth influence on Todd Rundgren.
To the uninitiated, Rundgren can often immediately evoke his distinguished career in the studio and keeping abreast with technology. Rarely panged with nostalgia, Rundgren has forged a career in sonic innovation, from A Wizard, a True Star’s psychedelic blitz, his production credits for New York Dolls and Bat Out of Hell, founding the prog-rock Utopia project, as well as dreaming up multi-media albums that embraced interactive software across the 1980s and ‘90s.
Yet, at heart, he was always a songwriter. Having absorbed the hits born from Bacharach’s pen as a youth for the likes of Chuck Jackson and The Shirelles, it was Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’ that stuck a hook in the teen Rundgren, immediately buying the Make Way for Dionne Warwick album, written and produced by Bacharach and collaborative partner Hal David, and spinning the LP as regularly as he did his beloved Beatles and Yardbirds. Rundgren’s musical ambitions changed there and then.
“At the time, I didn’t consider myself a songwriter,” Rundgren told Goldmine. “I just wanted to be a guitar player at that point. When eventually I did start writing songs, that influence had already been embedded in me. When I was in high school, we didn’t have a piano at home, so I used to stay after school and play the piano in the auditorium. That’s where I first got these chordal sensibilities, that’s closer to Bacharach than it is to a typical pop with a lot of major-minor sevens and weird suspensions and odd time signatures”.
Such songcraft quirks would inspire numbers like ‘Hello It’s Me’, the first song Rundgren ever wrote and initially recorded by former band Nazz, ’I Saw the Light’, and ‘Can We Still Be Friends?’ all shimmering with that rock-solid Bacharach knack for emotionally stirring pop. Rundgren’s fandom would amount to the What The World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook Live In Concert, a US tour featuring Rundgren and longtime Bacharach arranger Rob Shirakbari heading a nine-piece ensemble playing the old songsmith’s canon hits.
When considering the live repertoire, however, one number proved an uphill struggle due to the emotional peak imbued by a guest co-writer. Working together on 1988’s Painted from Memory, Elvis Costello would help pen the ‘God Give Me Strength’ standard that both he and Bacharach routinely performed individually on subsequent shows. While an admirer, Rundgren knew that Costello’s compositional touch would demand a rethink for Rundgren’s live tackle.
“There’s this little tantrum in the middle of the song,” Rundgren expanded. “It’s a great song. We more or less cut out the climax because it’s so un-Bacharach. Elvis’ lyrics are often a combination of self-pity and anger. This song is no different. It’s wordy. It’s typical Elvis. But there’s a moment in the middle that I can’t emotionally deliver when he says, ‘I want him to hurt.’”
Rundgren added, “He wants someone else to suffer along with him. That seems so un-Bacharach to me. After all, this tour is called ‘What the World Needs Now is Love,’ [laughs] and what the world doesn’t need now is more hurt people.”
Deeming the line contrary to the theme of the tour, Rundgren and the team decided to simply omit it from the number. It’s understandable.
In an effort to make ‘God Give Me Strength’ his own, creative reshapes have to happen, but perhaps removing such a barbed line dulls what made Bacharach’s songbook so interesting, hiding the aching and relatable humanity bristling underneath the most infectiously sunny pop gem or beguilingly easy-listening lull.
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