Todd Rundgren has never been shy about saying what he thinks, and this week he aimed it at the biggest target in pop. In a new interview with Vulture, published September 25, the 78-year-old producer and songwriter said there is “an argument to be made” that Taylor Swift “ruined music.” The comments landed on the same day Swift released The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, a four-song follow-up to her 2025 album.
It was not a passing remark. By the accounts of the outlets that picked up the interview, Rundgren went on at some length, and he did not stop at Swift.
What Rundgren actually said
The conversation began with a question about satire. Vulture writer Devon Ivie reminded Rundgren that he produced Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell partly as a send-up of Bruce Springsteen, and asked who he would lampoon if he were making a record like that in 2026. According to Stereogum, his answer was immediate: “Taylor Swift, of course.”
From there, as Consequence reported, he called her “the apotheosis of mediocrity” and went through her skills one by one. “She’s not a great singer. She’s not a great songwriter. She’s not a great dancer,” he said, adding that she “doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair.”
He offered Lady Gaga as the counterexample, describing her as a “real musician” and a classically trained piano player. That comparison matters to his argument. Rundgren’s complaint is not about pop stars in general, or even about women dominating the charts. It is about what he sees as the gap between popularity and musicianship.
His theory of how it happened
The most unusual part of the interview is Rundgren’s explanation for why Swift’s kind of stardom took hold at all. Consequence and Spectrum FM both summarize it the same way. In the 1990s, he argued, teenage boys moved their spending money away from records and into video games. With that audience drifting off, the labels turned their attention to young girls, and mainstream pop reshaped itself around them.
It is a theory, not a data set, and plenty of readers will push back on it. But it explains why Rundgren frames Swift as a symptom as much as a cause. In his telling, she is what the industry built once it decided who its customers were.
McCartney caught in the crossfire
Swift was not the only name he took aim at. Stereogum reports that Rundgren also turned on Paul McCartney, saying the former Beatle is “so afraid that people forget who he is” that he would show up at a mall opening.
That line is worth noting because it cuts against the easy reading of this story. This is not simply an older rock artist defending his own generation against a younger pop star. Rundgren was just as happy to needle one of the most revered figures in rock history in the same conversation. The Consequence write-up centers on the Swift and Gaga material rather than the McCartney line, so readers who only saw one outlet may have come away with a narrower picture of the interview.
A long record of saying no
Anyone who has followed Rundgren’s career will not be surprised by any of this. He has spent more than five decades as a contrarian, both in the studio and in public. When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, he skipped the ceremony and played a show in Cincinnati instead. He had called the institution a “scam” and an “industry invention,” and argued that true halls of fame “are for retirees and dead people.”
So when Rundgren says something inflammatory, it is usually consistent with positions he has held for years. His view of the music business as a machine that rewards the wrong things runs through much of what he has said in interviews over the decades.
The timing
Whatever Rundgren intended, the comments arrived at a moment when Swift was already dominating the news cycle. Billboard reports that The Encore went up on September 25 with four new tracks, among them “Patient Zero” and “Cleveland!” Fans spent the day decoding lyrics and debating which ex or which city each song was about.
None of the coverage so far reports any response from Swift or her team.
Why it will keep people arguing
The case against Rundgren’s view is easy to make. Swift writes or co-writes her own material, she has sold on a scale almost nobody in rock history has matched, and her Eras Tour was the highest-grossing tour ever. For millions of listeners, the idea that she lacks songwriting talent will read as simply wrong.
The case for him is that commercial success has never been the same thing as craft, and that a producer who made Something/Anything? and shaped records for Meat Loaf, Grand Funk Railroad and XTC has earned the right to an opinion about what makes a great record.
Neither side is likely to be persuaded. That is probably the point. Rundgren was asked who he would mock, and he gave the honest answer of someone who has never much cared who he upsets.
