With his new album, "Arena," classic rocker Todd Rundgren [ tickets ] hopes to revive what he believes is a long-forgotten way of music.

"It's something of a revisitation to what I knew as arena rock," Rundgren said via telephone with LiveDaily from his Hawaii home. "That's the kind of music that, in the early '70s to mid '70s, reached its maturity and peaked just about the time that Eddie Van Halen decided to play synthesizer on 'Jump.' Then it was over. Essentially, [arena rock] was music written on and played by guitars. It wasn't that keyboards weren't around. It wasn't like synthesizers. You could use a piano or organ every once in awhile, but you stayed away from the highly synthetic sounds and let the guitarist do most of the heavy lifting."

In recent years, Rundgren said, he even eschewed guitars in many instances. On his previous album, 2004's "Liars," the guitar was primarily featured only in solos and the occasional heavy moment.

"In this instance, I wanted to find guitar sounds that would fill up all those spaces and have the necessary harmonic richness," Rundgren said. "The sound really fills up your ears, but it's not filled with a whole bunch of different things. It's quite obviously a guitar."

During the four years between his solo albums, Rundgren explained he "played all over the place," promoting "Liars" and then hopping on an acoustic singer/songwriter jaunt with Joe Jackson. He even endured tragedy.

"Then I joined up with The New Cars and right when we were supposed to begin our big worldwide tour, we had an accident on the bus and Elliot Easton broke his collarbone," said Rundgren, who added the group only plays private gigs at the moment.

"So that brought the touring to an abrupt halt. It was at that point that I got back into doing the guitar-oriented, guitar-quartet thing. It was a quick and easy way to tour when I found myself suddenly without a tour from injury. The response that I got was sort of remarkable. I think it was taking fans back to a time when they first became fans."

Rundgren said he believes a lot of fans missed seeing him in the "frontman guitar-playing rock 'n' roll hero guise."

"That's when I decided that, when I got around to making another record, it would be mostly about the guitar and follow up on that sense of what the audience wanted to hear," he said.

On his current tour, Rundgren is playing "Arena" in its entirety, but he does also touch on older material such as "Bang the Drum All Day" and "Hello It's Me."

"We're going to focus a lot on new material," Rundgren said. "We do a bit of old material, all of it appropriate to guitar quartet--or quintet in this particular instance because we've got five people in the band. Then we make the meat of the show the new record. We play it from top to bottom, which is an hour's worth of material that the audience hasn't heard before. We've been doing this since the end of June and the response has been great."

Because the album was just released on Sept. 30, Rundgren said many people are unfamiliar with his new material. As a tutorial, he explained the lyrics contain subject matter "directed mostly at men."

"We've been led in the past eight years by liars and hypocrites and perverts and miscreants of all kinds," he explained. "[With] the president of our country, people are resigned to the fact that he is either a drunk, a fantasist or a liar--or all three. I'm fearful that men will look at that and say, 'Oh, that's how you succeed. That's how you get to the top of the pile, by being a liar, a coward, a pervert,' and I suppose that the message on the record is to call men back to what would be traditional values, but the things that we can admire about men, like their heroism, take the bullet for the friend, protect the weak, make the hard decisions, do the hard work. Don't be constantly looking for short cuts. Realize the ennobling value of labor. These are so-called traditional values. They might even be considered right-wing values.

"I just think they are properly manly values and that this record is about that. It is not about all of these clowns who never went to work and love to shoot their mouth off about it. There's nothing to admire about that. The people you admire are the people who take their burdens on quietly and execute them with supreme responsibility as opposed to hubris."