Song: I Saw The Light Artist: Todd Rundgren (Originally published July 19, 2014)

1972 was a memorable year for me, but not in a good way.  In May of that year, my mother died.  I was 14 and devastated, but one of the ways that I found to express my grief was by writing songs.

Whenever I see the song title “I Saw The Light” I’m reminded of the old bluegrass song, but there is actually another song that was a hit for Todd Rundgren in 1972 by the same name.

The other night I was in Vancouver watching Ringo and His All Star Band, and had the pleasure of seeing Rundgren perform his song live along with Ringo and members of Toto, Santana and Mr. Mister. Funny thing was that back in 1972, I didn’t know it was Todd Rundgren who wrote it because I didn’t pay as much attention to artists as I did to songs back then.  I do remember the song Hello It’s Me being attributed to Rundgren, and he performed that one as well the other night.  But I can’t say that I knew Bang On The Drum, It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference and Love Is The Answer were Rundgren songs either. They were all on the set list that night.

I Saw The Light and Love Is The Answer, which came later, definitely had an impact on my early songwriting, especially because of the major and minor seventh chords in each of them.  When I discovered those chords and moved between them on my guitar, I was utterly hooked and ended up writing quite a few songs with those chord combinations.  It wasn’t until the other night, however, that I made that connection and realized those songs came from the same person.  So thanks, Todd, without question you inspired my songwriting.

The genre of I Saw The Light was called “soft rock”, which was how I described my early songwriting.  You don’t see references to that very much these days;  it was a 70’s genre for sure. There was even a Soft Rock Cafe in Kitsilano, a suburb of Vancouver, where I occasionally performed in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Whenever I’m meeting new guitar students, I inevitably ask them what kind of music they like.  It occurs to me that more often than not, the younger ones have more trouble defining a genre or an artist, and simply go by the song.  That’s probably the truth of it;  songs by themselves stick with us and early on in our lives we don’t pay much attention to anything else.

I Saw The Light is so very 70’s :-).  Beyond that, I will just let it speak for itself! ~ IJ