Nearly Human (1989)

Todd Rundgren was a deep if brief infatuation of mine in the mid-'70s, though I never quite grokked the widely hailed classic double-LP Something/Anything; I liked pieces of it but on the whole it left me cold. My favorites, such as the first Utopia project (with one side a single 30-minute "song"), veered dangerously close either to fusion indulgences or, as with Initiation's "Real Man," to a kind of self-pitying self-help project for post-adolescent males. A Wizard/A True Star was my album of choice, and by the time of the absurd Faithful I was pretty much over the whole thing. Then, nearly 15 years later, came this. I picked it out of the slush pile at a newsweekly for which I was freelancing concert and album reviews—in those situations I often clutched at anything that seemed the least bit promising. And this one repaid, perhaps because of a painful divorce I was working through at the time and the opportunity this incidentally afforded to return to a past when things seemed safer, at least from the temporary vantage. For a short time I revisited with relish the various contradictory pleasures of Rundgren, who manages to take the kind of overweening technical prowess that can make Steely Dan productions at once so clinically admirable and so hollow and put it together with the heart of a soul man who knows his way around some of the most affecting strategies of songwriting and the mind of the post-adolescent male (strong as ever more than a decade on, talking about him not me, but it applied to me as well) who longs 24/7 for the fantasy of the girlfriend who surpasseth all understanding. Here Rundgren turns formally to gospel textures, backing up some of the tracks with entire choral choirs and letting it unspool for upwards of five or seven minutes apiece. Sometimes that works. The Elvis Costello cover, "Two Little Hitlers," I think mostly does not, though it was nice to see Rundgren finally engaging with the aftermath of 1977. What I like best, what I return to even still, are a few songs—"The Want of a Nail," "Fidelity," and especially "Parallel Lines"—that somehow put me back in the old Wizard way of hearing him, heartfelt, simple, open, lovely declarations of how it feels to be alive and all the poignant experience that it entails. Sometimes I sing along but most often I just sit quietly and listen, happy to reconnect once again with this strange gnomic figure of my youth.