"Hello It's Me" was the b-side of "Open My Eyes" when the Nazz single was released. It was the first song Rundgren ever wrote. Although originally recorded by Todd Rundgren's late 1960s band The Nazz, and included on their 1968 debut album, in 1972, the year he released his third solo album "Something/Anything?", it contained a new version of this song that eventually caught on and established Rundgren as a solo artist. This dirge-like version with lead vocals by Stewkey Antoni by Nazz received little attention, and made just #66 in the US. This song, and many others Rundgren wrote at the time, was inspired by a high school relationship that didn't work out. In real life, Rundgren was the one getting dumped, but he flipped the story so he was breaking up with the girl. Speaking with Marc Myers in 2018, Rundgren explained that the girl was named Linda, and she was his high school girlfriend. He had long hair, and one day when he walked her home, Linda's dad saw him for the first time and turned the hose on him - no hippie kid was going to date his daughter. A few days later, Linda acceded to her father's wishes and broke up with him. She did it rather casually, which Todd didn't appreciate. Rundgren wrote the lyric thinking about how he would have liked Linda to break up with him: in a sensitive phone call where she tells him it's important that he's free. Many years later, Rundgren was in Tulsa for a concert (this was likely March 31, 2003) when Linda called his hotel asking for tickets to the show. He put her on the guestlist, but never told her she inspired his most famous song. "Our lives had gone in different directions," he said. "We had nothing to say. I also wanted to hold on to the image I have of her in high school." In his teens, Todd was an avid listener to music but it was only when he put The Nazz together at the age of 19 that the young musician realized he'd better start penning some material. He attributes the sophistication and success of this song to the vast amount of listening he'd done by the time he wrote it. A specific musical inspiration was the Dionne Warwick song "Walk On By," written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. " I hadn't thought much about the songwriter's role previous to listening to that record and realizing how different it was, how it had all the qualities of music that I admired, and yet it also was a song," Rundgren said in his 2018 Songfacts interview. "That was the first time I really started to, in my own head, deconstruct what a songwriter was doing. That song had a lot of influence in 'Hello It's Me.'" Rundgren's songs in this early phase of his career were heavily influenced by the work of Laura Nyro, but in a 2005 interview he revealed that the basic structure of the song was adapted from the introduction of a Jimmy Smith (a renowned jazz artist) recording: "...the main influence for Hello It's Me was an eight bar intro that Jimmy Smith played on a recording of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. He had this whole sort of block chord thing that he did to set up the intro of the song. I tried to capture those changes, and those changes became what are the changes underneath Hello It's Me. I then had to come up with melody and words, but the changes are actually almost lifted literally from something that was, from Jimmy Smith's standpoint, a throwaway." The 1972 solo single opens with three distinct notes on the bass, a part Stu Woods came up with in the studio. The album version features a few false starts due to the confusion over which musicians were supposed to play first. "When we were in the studio, a lot of people had a hard time hearing where they were supposed to come in," Rundgren recalled to Mix magazine in 2019. "The only person who was supposed to come in on four was the bass, and everyone else was supposed to come in on one, but everyone kept coming in on four. So if you listen to the album version, you can hear all these false starts." Rundgren didn't have any concrete ideas for the new arrangement and came up with it on the fly in the studio. "I hadn't written out the arrangements," he explained. "I had something stewing in my head and said, 'Here are the changes to the song,' then taught them the changes, found the feel I liked. If somebody played something I didn't like, I'd say, 'No, don't play that, change it to something else.' I wanted it to be less dirge-y than the original and have a little more energy to it. Music had evolved a little, so I wanted something that sounded a bit more contemporary, as opposed to the original stripped-down band."