Hello It's Me

from the LP Something / Anything, Bearsville Records, 1972



WARNING --- the following song is a deeply guilty pleasure for me, thus rendering it impenetrable to criticism and leaving my opinions on the matter heavily biased… you’ve been warned. It’s been my experience in life that some songs actually seem to imprint themselves onto the pleasure-center of your brain, typically at such an early age that you can’t clearly remember the first time you heard the song, but it doesn’t really matter because you only know life loving it. I appreciate a lot of what Todd Rundgren has done over his lengthy career, both the music he has created and the trail of photo-evidence which bears out the man’s rather severe image shifting, essentially broken into pre-LSD, during-LSD & post-LSD groupings; just do an image search on his name, the timeline draws itself. The guy is a certifiable genius, proficient in at least 8 or 9 different instruments (he plays every single note and beat you hear on this track), and he writes songs like this in his sleep. As prefaced above, I can’t remember a time in life when this track wasn’t in heavy rotation on a plethora of radio stations, and something about the easy pace here always draws me in; this is atypical for a person who normally loathes “love” songs. I can’t help it though, as soon as those introductory piano stabs begin my cold shell melts away, happily enslaved to the lightest rock this side of alabaster! Btw, it’s definitely worth checking out his live performance of this on the Midnight Special, circa 1973, found on youtube; I’m guessing & hoping that drugs were involved in the outfit choice, or a dare of some sort, or perhaps both…