Todd Rundgren’s latest studio album is a collaborative affair. Rundgren has been making records on which he is the sole musician since his classic 1972 double album, Something/Anything? While he’s veered from this approach over the years, including his work with Utopia and some of his touring groups, this has generally been his modus operandi since 2004’s Liars, on through Arena (2008), State (2013) and Global (2015), with a few breaks along the way (most notably 2015’s Runndans, his 39-minute psychedelic sonic sculpture with Emil Nikolaisen and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm).

On White Knight, Rundgren invites artists such as Dâm-Funk, Donald Fagen, Daryl Hall, Bettye LaVette, Joe Satriani, Joe Walsh and Robyn to join in on his process of crafting new music, folding in elements of synth-rock, hip-hop, funk and classic pop.

Rundgren speaks with his typical candor when discussing the origins of White Knight. “The precipitating factor was that a label came and offered me money to make the record. I might not have made a record last year unless someone prodded me to do it. If a label does approach you and gives you a budget of any substance, you should probably take it and make that record because it doesn’t happen as often as it used to.

“Once I got that offer, I started conceptualizing what I wanted to do, and that’s when I got the idea of doing a mostly collaborative record. I live on the island of Hawaii, which is six hours from the mainland; and so, with my recent records, anytime I wanted to do a session, it was prohibitive to just call up everyone to say, ‘Fly on over, we’re going to record a song today.’ So most of my records were just me doing it all myself, and I decided that I’d done enough of that. So I knew I was going to do a lot of collaboration and, about a year ago, I started calling people to see if they wanted to consider the possibility, and then, during fall, I began to put it together in earnest.”

COME

“Come” is one of the tracks that’s just me. It’s a setup for the rest of the record. It’s an invitation to an adventure of a musical sort because you’re going to be experiencing artists that don’t usually appear on my records.

GOT YOUR BACK FEATURING KK WATSON WITH DÂM-FUNK

Dâm-Funk was my DJ on the first half of the Global tour. He’s an artist from Los Angeles, and he’s got his own scene going there because he does this new-age funk thing. I asked him to send me something, and he sent me a track that I manipulated. I pulled some things out of it, added some things and wrote a song around it. “Got Your Back” is his catchphrase. Whenever I’d send him an email or tell him, “I need this from you,” he’d say: “I got your back.” So the title was just hanging out there; all I had to do was figure out the song that went with it.

KK Watson is a local upand-comer out on Kauai. He hasn’t broken yet, but I thought, “Maybe I’ll give him a little chance to do something.” He’s just getting into the business now, and I hope to give him a little break.

CHANCE FOR US FEATURING DARYL HALL WITH BOBBY STRICKLAND

I had the track, and I knew that it had a certain sound to it—a certain old-school R&B, pop thing going. I had spoken to Daryl about the possibility and he was open to it. When I came up with the idea, I actually forced myself not to finish it so I would give Daryl the most opportunity to add his ideas. I wanted it to be very Daryl-esque, so he came up with the title and most all of the lyrics except for the bridge sections.

Then, I realized there was a section that would probably be better instrumentally than if we just tried to write a third vocal part. Bobby is my go-to guy when it comes to sax—if I carry a sax player on the road, he’s the one. Fortunately, he had the time and wherewithal to put his part on it. As usual, it came back brilliant.

FICTION

That, again, is one where it’s me doing everything just like I used to do. I might have liked to have gotten another artist to perform the song, but if I’m too successful at getting other artists, then I’m not singing anything—and I don’t think my audience quite wants that. So this was an instance where I thought it was appropriate for me to do it.

BEGINNING (OF THE END) FEATURING JOHN BOUTTE

“Beginning (of the End)” is an interesting song because, when I first sang it, I thought: “I’m pretty happy with this vocal, but I really do want to get somebody that can take it to another place.” So I called my friend John Boutte, who had agreed to do something. He liked the song, but the problem was his range is much higher than mine, so we had to keep raising the key on it. I had to keep re-singing the backing vocals on it in higher and higher keys until we compromised on the final key because I couldn’t sing any higher than that.

TIN FOIL HAT FEATURING DONALD FAGEN

This was a fortunate coincidence because, as I was in the final weeks wrapping up the record, Donald came out to Kauai. He had actually lived there after 9/11—he moved to the island for a couple years. So I had socialized and done a little musical work with him before, and we were out to dinner—I think it was January—and I said, “You know, I’m finishing up a record and I’ve got this organ track I haven’t figured out what to do with. Can I send it to you?” He said, “Sure.”

He listened to it and started sending titles back to me, one of which was “Tin Foil Hat.” So we agreed on the title and, since he was on the island, we got together a couple times and finished the lyrics. Then, I went over to his house with my laptop, and he sang the vocals. That was the only instance in which me and the other artist were in the same room at the same time, in the way you would think a collaboration was supposed to go. Every other collaboration was done remotely.

LOOK AT ME FEATURING MICHAEL HOLMAN

I wanted to write a song about the meeting of Kanye West and Donald Trump at Trump Tower, and what kind of mentality that produced. This is the soundtrack to that. [Laughs.]

I was hoping to get one of these young crazy rappers like Tyler, the Creator on it. He had agreed to do something but got involved in his own project and just ran out of time. So I got one of my older friends, Michael Holman, who was an original hip-hop entrepreneur, to put his thing on there.

LET’S DO THIS WITH MOE BERG

That’s my old friend Moe Berg from Pursuit of Happiness. I gave him a call and I’m not sure whether he wrote this from scratch just for me, or whether it was an idea that he had, but it wasn’t long after I talked to him that he sent me this. I was especially delighted to get it because it’s so Moe Berg.

Moe writes everything on guitar; he never writes on piano. It’s always great to get somebody who has a very unique, personal way of approaching the instrument. All he sent me was the instrumental part of it. I did a little bit of rearranging on it to give it a different dynamic and then wrote a song to go with it, hoping it would be the best of all possible worlds—the way that he hears things and the way that I hear things. If he had been writing the song, it would have been a dirty lyric about a girl, but I wrote a song about going out on the road and playing rock-and-roll, like “We’re an American Band.” [Laughs.]

SLEEP WITH JOE WALSH

This is the song that differs the most dramatically from the version that was originally sent to me. Joe sent me a version that had a weird drum machine going in the background, and it was a much more conventional approach. I heard the thing completely different. I rearranged it and eliminated a bunch of instruments and added a bunch of things, changed it a bit harmonically. By the time I gave it back to Joe, he didn’t recognize it. He liked it, but it wasn’t what he originally thought it was going to be at all.

I think there should be more of that—more surprises involved when you collaborate with people. That’s why I prefer the method of me sending them files, then doing whatever they do and sending it back to me. Then, I’m not always pestering them to do it the way I hear it. They do it more the way that they hear it and, therefore, there’s more purity in the collaboration because you’re not watering down the collaborators to compromise with each other.

THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ME FEATURING ROBYN

One major challenge on this record was it was hard to plan with people’s schedules and, of course, they also had to like the song. I had spoken with Robyn in the months before about doing something, but I didn’t have it in my head what it might be. Then, when I got near the end of the album, I had something that could work. So I wrote the melody for a female range, did the reference vocals in falsetto, and then sent it off to her to sing—fortunately, she does it in full voice. She liked the song and it turned out to be pretty much the lead track for the record.

I’ve gotten a little grief from a fan or two about, “Why aren’t you singing this?” But collaborations aren’t always Tony Bennett dueting with somebody. They take a different form nowadays: Disclosure will write the whole track and have The Weeknd sing it, so you don’t know if it’s a Disclosure record or The Weeknd’s. It’s the same thing here.

DEAF EARS WITH TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS

I’ve worked with Trent before. I did a remix of one of his records, so I knew that he’s really easy to work with and he likes to collaborate, but I didn’t expect the response that I got. A couple days after I spoke to him, he sent me an album’s worth of stuff to choose from because he’s been doing a lot of soundtrack work lately with his partner, Atticus Ross, and they have a library of stuff that they draw from when someone asks for music for a film or something. So, essentially, he sent me a big batch of those and all I had to do was pick one. I picked two because I was torn; I couldn’t whittle it down. Eventually, the one that stuck was “Deaf Ears.”

NAKED & AFRAID FEATURING BETTYE LAVETTE

Bettye LaVette’s stock and trade is taking classic songs, songs that you know have been done to death and everyone is familiar with them, and really personalizing them. She’s not a bombastic singer. For the most part, she sings very intimately, so for her to blast it out on a song like this is unusual. I was surprised that she was willing to do it, but I was also pleasantly surprised at the end because it was sort of what I imagined. I was imagining Tina Turner around the Thunderdome phase. She got there. I wanted it to be scary, and it was scary.

I’ve known Bettye for a long time. We’ve done shows together, and there was a point at which I was perhaps going to produce a record for her. I always knew, at a certain point, that if we worked together, I was going to be dragging her out of her comfort zone. We’re good enough friends that she was willing to give it a try and, in the end, I think we were all pretty happy with the result.

BUY MY T

This song is actually almost specifically about the guy that does my merch, and his son, who is an internet music phenomenon. They don’t sell their music ever; they do YouTube videos and then they sell concert tickets and merchandise. They don’t have a record deal and there’s no way you can buy a song of theirs. You can only see them on YouTube and you can only go to their shows and buy the merchandise.

This, to me, is the new music model. There’s no record company involved at all, and everything that you sell pretty much is merchandise, as opposed to CDs. They don’t even sell CDs at their shows—they never put their music on CDs. They’re in the T-shirt business more than they’re in the music business.

I think when Radiohead put out a new record and said, “Pay whatever you want for it,” they realized that, in the long run, you make so much more money if you sell out a concert than if you sell a lot of records because, with records, you get the short end of it. You get 10-20 percent of the cost of the record. With concerts, you get the long end—you get 80 percent of it, and a concert ticket costs twice as much as the record. So records are and always have been advertising for your live shows.

WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW FEATURING REBOP RUNDGREN

I was getting near the end of it and I wanted to get my son involved because he does something that I can’t do—he plays this fingerpicking style of guitar, which I never learned how to do. So I asked him to play some stuff for me, and he gave me a couple of themes that became the inspiration for this song. Since it was a sort of fingerpicking thing, I wanted it to be more pastoral than a lot of the other material—not so harsh, a little bit easier to handle.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL FEATURING JOE SATRIANI WITH PRAIRIE PRINCE, KASIM SULTON

Joe Satriani is a really easy guy to work with—very positive. He sent me a track that had all of the components I needed, but when I heard it, I heard it in a different order, so I changed a few things around. I added strings and orchestral elements because I wanted it to be really big sounding and, from then on, it just kind of wrote itself. Again, to some degree, it’s inspired by current events, metaphorically. It’s not about a literal invasion of Attila and the Huns. It’s more of an invasion of the stupid people in our country.

When I got it from Joe, he had some reference drums on it, which were prerecorded drums out of the drum library. I realized I would have to replace that, so I asked Prairie [who is a member of Rundgren’s touring band, as is Kasim Sulton]. Kasim always wants to be on the record, and I had already promised him, so this seemed the obvious place to get him on. Kasim did his in his studio and Prairie did his in another studio, so the remote Lynn Goldsmith collaboration was still in full effect.