Hermit of Mink Hollow

Rundgren played everything on it, from guitars, bass and drums to keyboards, saxophone and percussion, and engineered it himself with extra help from Mike Young. He described himself as a studio hermit. The control room was upstairs and the drums were downstairs, so every drum retake meant a run up the stairs. Worries from Bearsville's Paul Fishkin about the running order led to the split into an Easy Side and a Difficult Side. The songs are often set beside Joni Mitchell's Blue and Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, though Rundgren said they were not necessarily about his own life. The cover shows him alone in his garden, tinted blue like a video screen.

It reached No. 36 in the US and No. 11 in Australia. Rolling Stone's Michael Bloom said he was still an artist to be taken seriously, and AllMusic called it his most emotional record. Christgau was less impressed and gave it a C plus, noting that the best song sat on the easy side.