Musical pioneer and producer Todd Rundgren brings his “Unpredictable” tour to Blue Note Hawaii this weekend. It’s unpredictable because he draws on his vast, 40-plus years in the music business to put together a song list on the spur of the moment.

“It’s a different set every night,” he said. “We go for two hours and (perform) however many songs fit into that. And the list is not exclusively mine — as a matter of fact, only about a third of it is mine. The rest of it is various one-hit wonders and oddments that we’ve collected over the years — songs that people have probably never heard before or haven’t heard in a particularly long time.”

You can likely expect Rundgren’s hits, the best-known of which are “Hello, It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light” from 1972 album “Something/Anything?” — but get ready, too, for something like “Incense and Peppermints,” the psychedelic tune from Strawberry Alarm Clock, or a Lorne Greene (yes, of “Bonanza”) song.

“We’ve got everything from going back to old Tony Bennett songs to Weezer to the Proclaimers. And we’re adding stuff all the time,” said Rundgren, who’s been a Kauai resident for 23 years.

“Everyone knows the songs and can play them, often as well as the original. … Every once in a while I like to play Stump the Band by pulling out something that we haven’t played in a very long time and seeing whether anyone remembers it.”

Rundgren, a man of sardonic, insightful wit, has been among the most prolific and versatile artists in the business.

While his career with his first group, Nazz, was still burgeoning, he got into music producing after being dissatisfied with the recording quality of the band’s first albums.

At age 19, he was hired to produce for the Bearsville Records label, learning how to work the technology to produce the best sound.

The experience eventually led him to create and produce music on computers, and a brainstorm about “how listeners had changed their relationship to music.”

“We could do things with digitized music that you couldn’t do with analog music, like go to any random part of the song and start playing it from there,” he said. “The other thing was that I came to the realization that music was a limited palette and that a lot of it would be repeated. That was evidenced by the fact that the biggest song that year was ‘Can’t Touch This’ by MC Hammer, which was actually a Rick James song. So you realize that all this music is interchangeable in a way.”

Rundgren developed the idea for an interactive music system, which would essentially allow a user to deconstruct a song and make it “more or less conform to what you wanted,” playing it slower or faster if you wanted, emphasizing certain instruments or leaving out the vocals.

The problem was, music was needed from the record labels, and they wouldn’t cooperate.

“None of them would even entertain the idea of putting their music on a server,” Rundgren said. “That was two years before (internet file-sharing service) Napster, so they didn’t put their music on a server, somebody else did. They were too dumb to see what was happening.”

RUNDGREN’S WORK is now wonderfully balanced between live shows — he’s been on tour for about nine months this year alone —and producing music on various instruments and the computer.

His most recent album, 2017’s “White Knight” features his latest kick, collaborations.

He performs songs with Daryl Hall — who famously brought his webcast “Live from Daryl’s House” to Rundgren’s Kauai estate — as well as the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and others.

Rundgren grew up near Philadelphia in a household that favored show tunes. His early influences were Laura Nyro and Burt Bacharach — “a pretty good pedigree,” he said.

He is primarily a self-taught musician, starting with flute and clarinet in grade school and eventually getting a guitar.

Even then, he was beginning to show an iconoclastic side.

“The guitar came with three months of lessons, which I hated,” he said. “That was as much formal musical training as I got. The rest of it has been pretty much hands-on.

“I can make a sound with a lot of instruments,” Rundgren said. “The question is, not being able to read music in the first place, I’m limited in terms of the variety of things that I can play. But I figure if I can make a sound or make a couple of notes, I can write something around it.”

His versatility was on full display in “Something/Anything?” — he played several instruments for the double-disc album and composed all the songs. His second band, Utopia, formed in the mid-’70s, established him as a progressive, experimental rocker, with three keyboard players on synthesizers doing extended instrumentals.

AT THE same time, Rundgren’s stage presence became equally arresting, with flamboyant costuming and suitably rocker hairstyles.

“I had a makeup-guy-slash-costumer and I just gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted. It would often be as much of a surprise to me as it was to everyone else what I was wearing, especially when he made me up like a bird for the ‘Midnight Special’,” Rundgren said with a laugh. “I still like to play dress-up at times.”

For his appearance at the Blue Note, Rundgren performs with guitarist Jesse Gress, drummer Prairie Prince, bassist Kasim Sulton and keyboard player Greg Hawkes.