With one of those commanding FM-deejay voices, Todd Rundgren sounds nothing like the guy who could have sung "Hello, It's Me" back in the early '70s.

And it's only 8 a.m. in Hawaii, where Rundgren sounds very much awake. Between building a new house, building a new record and preparing for a tour of the mainland, the 59-year-old rocker has a lot on his agenda.

Rundgren, who grew up near Philadelphia, makes his home in Hawaii now, having made what he calls "an inexorable Western migration." Part of the reason, he says, is that "during the peak of gangster rap popularity, we were in Sausalito and my oldest son, who was 15 at the time, started to think he was in Tupac's gang."

The family moved to a small town on a Hawaiian island, where Rundgren has his base of operations, including the home studio, where the multi-instrumentalist has always been pretty self-sufficient.

As a touring act, Rundgren has been known to throw his fan base plenty of curves. You don't know if you're getting vintage pop, space-rock, techno or bossa nova. His last venture off the island might have been his strangest. He took the place of Ric Ocasek in a semi-Cars reunion they called the New Cars. What made him want to do that?

"I was asked by Elliot [Easton] to do it at a time when I didn't have a whole lot else going," he says. "I was between albums, and I've also historically been open to doing things with other musicians for the experience of it and the exposure. One of the things you have to do as an artist, if you intend to survive, is to seek out and win over new audiences. Any time I have an opportunity to play for more people than I would myself, that's an advantage for me.

"The disadvantage was that unlike a lot of the bands from the '70s and '80s that reformed, most of them either had former members or there were deceased members and they were replaced by others, but the band would still have the name you remembered, such as the Doors. Obviously, no, Jim Morrison isn't going to show up. The problem with the Cars is that there were two members who didn't want to go out and tour anymore but they didn't want it to succeed without them."

Rundgren says the new Cars, which included Kasim Sulton from Utopia and Prairie Prince from the Tubes, got rave reviews from fans, who said the new band sounded better than the old Cars. But they had to use the name the New Cars, which was confusing to people and a hard-sell for promoters. "Everybody had nothing but questions," Rundgren says. "Is that a new band? A new band with no songs I've ever heard?"

The New Cars tour turned out to be a bust, and Rundgren says he wasn't about to stick around and try to build an identity for the band when he had his own career to manage.

Now, he's off on a solo tour that will show the fans a new look from the last few he's done. He's going out with a guitar quartet, playing material from recent to ancient, with a few covers thrown in. "The unusual thing about this tour," he says, "is that it's been a few years since I actually strapped on the guitar and fronted the band as a guitarist as opposed to just a singer who may play an occasional guitar solo."

Previously, he had been touring with a piano and an acoustic guitar, but he says that was wearing thin because he wasn't writing a lot of recent material that lent itself to that kind of "strumming and tinkling."

Rather, the follow-up to 2002's "Liars" will be a full-on rock album.

"It will be a concept album. Essentially, I'm going to do an arena rock record. Hopefully it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy," he says, laughing.

"It's big hook, big chords, sing-along choruses and arrangements are designed to echo through an ice rink. It's a bigger challenge than it seems like. Sing-along ability is not something that is automatic. There has to be something anthemic about the music and the subject matter."