Todd Rundgren Details His Frustrations Working With Kanye West On Donda

Katie Stratton/Getty Images for Coachella

Todd Rundgren Details His Frustrations Working With Kanye West On Donda

Katie Stratton/Getty Images for Coachella

Ahead of his induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame next month, Todd Rundgren is airing it all out. He just said that he won’t attend the induction ceremony, despite performing a show the same night a few hours away. And now he’s detailed his frustrations over working with Kanye West on Donda.

“I’m one of the few artists not on Kanye’s album,” Rundgren said in a recent interview with Ultimate Classic Rock. “I have three albums worth of Kanye stems on my computer. Because I kept getting called by Kanye to add vocals onto the record. When it got into the homestretch in July, I just said, ‘That’s enough for me. I have no idea whether any of this is being used.’ You don’t get much feedback from him regarding what it is.”

Rundgren said that he was invited into the fold by the producer 88-Keys, but that he quickly grew disillusioned with it all. “I’m still a producer, and I don’t just want to be like driftwood in the process,” he said. “If I can contribute something, fine. If I can’t, just let me know. I’m out of here […] There is a possibility that I’m actually in there somewhere. There’s so much junk in that record!”

He went on to call West “a shoe designer.” “He’s just a dilettante at this point. Nobody would regularly make records like that unless they had stupid money to throw around,” Rundgren said. “Nobody rents a stadium to make a record in. Nobody flies in the entire world of hip-hop just to croak one syllable, just so you can say that everybody was on it.” He continued:

My involvement went on for a year, and in the end I realized why they hurriedly wrapped the whole thing up and put out what is obviously really raw, unprocessed stuff. It’s because Drake was running the whole process. He was too afraid that Drake would one-up him, so he hurried up and released the album the weekend before Drake could get his out. And in the end, Drake ate his lunch anyway.

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