Todd Rundgren’s new album, “White Knight,” is a grab-bag of collaborations with fellow artists — among them, Trent Reznor, Daryl Hall, Bettye LaVette, Robyn, Donald Fagen, and Joes Walsh and Satriani, along with a lesser-known jazz singer and rapper or two. You could call them strange bedfellows if not for the uniting factor of somehow fitting in with Rundgren’s already eclectic career. For someone who’s spent most of a 50-year career crafting records alone in the studio, or giving marching orders as a producer, the sheer amount of co-writes, if not costarring roles, was an admittedly stretching experience.

But, at 68, Rundgren is suddenly pushing himself in other ways, like the sheer amount of touring he’s doing. Besides yet another stint in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band this summer, he’s doing an inordinate amount of shows under his own banner, as a headliner or as part of the “Yes-tival” touring collective headlined by Yes. He recently flew out to Coachella just to guest on his classic “Couldn’t I Just Tell You” with teen upstarts the Lemon Twigs. All of this, he acknowledges, is part of a deliberate move to get back in people’s faces in a way he hasn’t always cared about — driven, he reveals, by reflection upon the sudden passings of fellow unpredictable wizard/true stars David Bowie and Prince.

On the eve of the album’s release, Variety talked with Rundgren about this eagerness to get back in front of audiences… but why he doesn’t value that so much that he cares if his running commentary on President Trump makes a few fans cranky enough to head for the exits.

Some might think that a “collaborations album” means “duets album.” But there aren’t many duets on it. Sometimes it’s the other artist singing something you wrote, and sometimes it’s you singing something the other person co-wrote.

Daryl Hall is the only [duet], and that’s because me and Daryl have done that before, on his TV show (“Live from Daryl’s House”). We had worked together well in that context. But I specifically did not want to do a duets album. I didn’t want me and my guests stepping all over each other. I wanted them to do what they do and give them the space to do it without me showing up going, “Oh, here I am, don’t forget about me!” [Laughs.] It’s not really that unusual anymore to write a song and then have somebody else sing it. Disclosure will sing their own songs and then they’ll also have a guest vocalist like the Weeknd, and you sometimes don’t know whether it’s the new Weeknd song or the new Disclosure song. It gives me maybe a little bit more freedom in terms of the writing part, because I can write for other voices that don’t have the limitations of my own. If I wanted to have a song that had the sound of a female voice and maybe had something of a female perspective, it’s going to sound silly for me to do it.

It sounds like most of these were DropBox collaborations. With the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross song, they sent you some tracks to work on, but it must have worked the other way around as well.

Yeah, both ways. With the Robyn song, I more or less wrote the whole thing and recorded all of the backing and stuff like that, and there was nothing for her to do but sing it. In the case of Joe Satriani and Joe Walsh, oddly enough, a lot of the guitar players had very well-developed ideas that they sent me, actual whole tracks. When Trent sent me the raw materials that went into ”Dear Ears,” he sent me 11 other tracks — a whole album’s worth of stuff to choose from. [Reznor and Ross have released their own remix of Rundgren’s track], and that’s kind of a cool byproduct. The greatest thing about this era of electronic delivery of music is that even after you’ve come out with a big kind of opus thing, you can still add to it. Not every artist has the interest or the urge to do something like that, but when it happens, I think it’s completely in line with the whole idea of collaboration.

Did Reznor ever have a chance to gush about being a fan of yours, or is it all business?

No, it’s not all business. You would think that Trent would kind of be like his musical persona, but he’s completely not like that. He’s a very humble, accessible guy, and the first time I had any communication with him was when he asked me to do a remix a couple years ago for a project that he was doing. And he told me at the time, “I listen to ‘A Wizard, A True Star’ at least once a month.” He totally was completely open about it from the beginning. And I had the same kind of admiration for him. Because when I did Woodstock II (in 1994) and I had my own little pavilion in the high tech village there, the only act I bothered to go see was Nine Inch Nails. Everybody else, I knew what they were going to do, but I had no idea what Nine Inch Nails was going to do. And the first thing they did was wallow in a bog behind the stage before they went on, and that was fascinating. How can you play with all that mud all over you? But they did it!