Tuesday, 26 February 2013
He’d been doing most of it on his own for a while, and as far back as Something/Anything he’d completed three sides out of four without assistance, but when Todd Rundgren’s eighth solo album arrived in 1978 it was credited to Todd Rundgren - Arranger, Instruments, Producer, Vocals and no one else. In between he’d been working with assorted session players and the members of Utopia, and had been pushing the limits of how much you could fit into the grooves of a single disc (A Wizard, A True Star) but Hermit headed back in the opposite direction, with eleven tracks clocking in just under 35 minutes (compared to Wizard’s nineteen and a tad under fifty-six minutes).
That mightn’t matter much in real terms, and Rundgren had been fairly prolific so you’d be inclined to suspect he’d have to slow down eventually. Alternatively, you could look at the breakup of his long term relationship with Bebe Buell, glance at the title and figure there’s this heartbroken bloke sitting in his cabin on Mink Hollow Road just west of Woodstock and this is all he’s been able to come up with.
Which would make sense if we were back in the Laura Nyro/Carole King territory he’d been working earlier, but despite the presence of a truly great break-up ballad (Can We Still Be Friends) and a couple of titles that might support that sort of hypothesis (Hurting for You, Too Far Gone, and, maybe You Cried Wolf) what we’ve got here is an interesting exercise in largely cheerful and upbeat power pop.
Actually, if you were looking for forensic evidence re. terminated relationships it might make more sense to return the tracks to the sequence listed on the back cover, which was what Rundgren delivered to the record label. Bearsville, in their wisdom, thought the original sequence was “too haphazard” and asked Rundgren to split the album into an “Easy Side” (comprising the lighter, poppier songs) and a “Difficult Side” with the cerebral or rockier songs, with the quirky Onomatopoeia, which would definitely qualify as “Cerebral” getting a guernsey on the “Easy” side...