Todd Rundgren – The Keswick Theatre – Glenside (A PopEntertainment.com Concert Review)
- PopEntertainment
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Updated: 9 minutes ago
Todd Rundgren – The Keswick Theatre – Glenside, PA – July 12, 2026
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Todd Rundgren returned home for two sold-out shows. Well at least to the Philadelphia area, sadly his home neighborhood venue, Upper Darby’s legendary Tower Theater, has been closed since soon after the pandemic. So he crossed the city and hit Glenside’s similar Keswick Theatre for his homecoming gigs.
In decades of going to concerts at the Keswick, I’ve never seen the place as crowded as it was for Sunday night’s closing show. The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist – who was self-confident enough in his prime to name one of his albums A Wizard, A True Star – gave an interesting and eclectic tour through his massive back catalog.
It was not really a hits tour. There were only five of his hit singles shared in the 27-song set. Missing in action were other hits and fan favorites like “We’ve Gotta Get You a Woman,” “A Dream Goes On Forever,” “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference,” “Lucky Guy,” and songs from his rocking side-project Utopia like “Set Me Free,” “Love is the Answer” and “Libertine.” However, this is sort of standard operating procedure for Rundgren, who always has considered concerts to be more of a career overview than a singles jukebox.
He had a crack backing band made up of long-time musical collaborators like keyboardist Gil Assayas, guitarist Bruce McDaniel, drummer Prairie Prince, multi-instrumentalist horn player Bobby Strickland, and bassist Kasim Sulton. All were sharp and rocked hard, and multi-instrumentalist Strickland stood out as perhaps the most joyful showman in the group. He was totally in the zone and made sure everyone knew it, often stealing the spotlight from his very able bandmates.
The frontman, who is a terrific performer, perhaps could have taken on some of his joyful exuberance. Not to say that he was in any way bad; in fact, he pulled off his rock star guitar hero moves pretty flawlessly, but he did not always radiate the sense of delight of his sax player.
Rundgren has always let the music do the talking, and on that front, he delivers – his guitar work remains remarkable and his voice, while not quite what it was, still carries the songs. But Rundgren tends to stand and deliver, professional and precise rather than spontaneous. It's a style, not a flaw – but next to Strickland's infectious joy, it occasionally made the frontman seem like the least excited person on stage. But the dude is 78 years old, you can’t expect him to jump around all over the theater.
He rarely spoke between songs. Only a few times did he try to engage the audience directly – although early on in the show he graciously thanked everyone for spending their discretionary income on his show in a time of such economic uncertainty and said he would work hard to make it worth their faith in him.
Honestly, a poor audio mix marred the first act of the show. Rundgren’s vocals were a bit buried in the mix under the instruments, making many of the lyrics nearly incomprehensible. For example, when you are having to let your brain fill in the lyrics to his huge early-70s hit “I Saw the Light” because the vocals are so low, that’s a problem. Even more of a problem when he is doing lesser-known songs like “Lost Horizon” or Utopia’s “Secret Society.” In fact, in the first two choruses of “A Woman’s World” I misheard the line as “Alone in the World.” However, after the intermission, the sound team fixed the problem and Rundgren’s voice was lifted higher, making his vocals more accessible.
It’s a shame, because other than the low vocals, “I Saw the Light” still shimmered with romantic ecstasy, and he also did a rocking interpretation of “Open My Eyes,” considered the definitive song from his first 1960s band Nazz. (Nazz also recorded an early version of “Hello, It’s Me,” but that song was only a minor hit for the group and became much better-known for Rundgren’s 1973 smash solo redo of the song.)
The second act started with a six-tune acoustic set, with Rundgren and the band doing unplugged versions of the upbeat pop of “Love of the Common Man” and the experimental protest song “Soul Brother.” The acoustic section ended with a version of the A Cappella song “Honest Work,” a Rundgren original that feels like a traditional Irish folk lament.
The whole band plugged back in for the final stretch with a fun take on a song which Rundgren admitted that everyone knew, but most people didn’t know the title or who actually wrote and sang it. He was proud to be the man behind a song which had achieved such accidental ubiquity. He admitted he hadn’t been performing “Bang the Drum All Day” in concert for about a decade, but people kept asking for it, so he decided to return it to his setlist.
The final stretch also had some interesting covers mixed in. He did a soulful medley of Curtis Mayfield’s “I’m So Proud,” Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby” and Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You.” Then he followed it up with what he called his first single in decades, a throbbing cover of the 1980s new wave classic “The Walls Came Down,” which he had recently recorded with the surviving members of the original band The Call, as a tribute to the band’s lead singer Michael Been, who died in 2010.
He returned for the encore with a beautiful, heartfelt version of his 1978 hit “Can We Still Be Friends?” Then he let the crowd take over and sing along when the very recognizable beats of “Hello, It’s Me” filled the Keswick, one of the few songs that truly got the audience out of their seats. By the time he closed out with “Sweeter Memories,” this show had become one of the crowd’s sweeter memories. It felt like a warm, slightly eccentric love letter from a hometown hero who still knows how to make a room feel connected.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2026 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: July 14, 2026.
Photos by George Seth Wagner © 2026. All rights reserved.
