Todd Rundgren performs tomorrow night at the Danforth Music Hall.

With a solo career that has been anything but structured, and having produced landmark rock albums such as Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell and the New York Dolls' self-titled debut among many others, Todd Rundgren definitely beats to his own drum.

But unlike recent tours that seen him co-headline with Joe Jackson and become a member of The New Cars, Rundgren is making himself front and centre on this current solo trek.

"I've either been the lead singer or the rhythm guitar player but in most cases I have not played that much lead guitar," he says from a Minneapolis hotel.

"A lot of my older fans remember me from the earlier years where I played a lot of lead guitar. So this is essentially getting back to the roots, albeit with a repertoire that contains some material from the recent past."

The musician, performing tomorrow night at Toronto's Danforth Music Hall Theatre, released his last studio album Liars in 2004.

Although a new album is in the planning stages, Rundgren seems to be enjoying himself more on this trek than his tour last year as part of The New Cars, a quasi-reunion of the '80s pop band.

"We had an essential problem and that was the member of The Cars who opted not to go on the road also opted not to use the name The Cars," he says.

"If we were called The Cars, people would've said, 'Oh, we know who they are. But who the hell are The New Cars?' It just didn't make any sense. It didn't make sense to go to a place and sell fewer tickets than if I was there by myself."

Perhaps Rundgren's biggest asset is how he can switch hats from producer to performer with relative ease.

"I learn something about production every time I do an album and I often learn something about music depending on the project I'm working on," he says. "So there are other reasons to produce as well as perform. The most important one is that if you do one of them too much you get burnt out on it. So it's good to be able to go between the two and essentially gain a new perspective."

He also says he likes to work with bands that not only have an album's worth of songs, but songs that are solid.

"It's one of the most important things from my standpoint, not only is it obvious if the songs are bad, but if the performer doesn't have some confidence in the material then it compromises the performance," he says.

"You often know people are satisfied but in the back of their minds they could have done a better job on part of a song or done a little bit more work."

While Rundgren isn't exactly nostalgic for bands from his earlier years, he certainly feels today's crop of pop artists are sadly in a class by themselves.

"Nowadays, the price of admission for a new artist is so huge and spent on such stupid things like dance lessons and hiring six keyboard players," he says. "And it's kind of pitiful because the music is awful. I mean Justin Timberlake? Give me a break. He writes a verse, that's it. He writes a verse and the verse becomes the chorus and it just goes on forever."

Rundgren way ahead of online music revolution

While bands and labels survive and cope with how the Internet has altered the music business, Todd Rundgren was way ahead of the curve.

After making the world's first album for digital download in 1994, Rundgren created Patronet in 1998, an online music subscription service that basically cut out the labels and other meddling middlemen.

He says while labels are trying to adapt, they've definitely dropped the ball when it comes to the online world.

"The problem is this whole Internet thing was unpredictability itself. We were talking to them before there even was an Internet. It was at a time when they were actually able to gain control of the process. They just closed their eyes and said, 'There's nothing we can do about it, we're just going to let it hit us like a tidal wave and essentially drown us.' "

One trend Rundgren sees as benefitting many artists is copying Radiohead's "pay what you want" online model with their recent In Rainbows album.

"The musician has always made his living by playing for people," he says. "It's been a century-long aberration where people thought they could make records and then dump trucks full of money would arrive on their front door.

"Let's say after all the expenses of making a record you would make a dollar for every record sold. So if you sold a million copies of a record you would make a million dollars in a year.

"If you had a million-selling album, you can make a million dollars every two weeks on the road because of the higher margin that a concert ticket represents.

"If you have a hit record you can play for audiences. If you have to give it away to get a hit record, do it."