Songfacts®:

• It's kind of surprising that this song didn't make the Hot 100. Todd Rundgren, who wrote it, was a fairly consistent hitmaker, and the song had a slick new wave sound that may have been just slightly ahead of its time. The lyric is straightforward, basically an elaboration on the saying "time heals all wounds," but it was an important mantra for Rundgren at the time. In August 1980, Rudgren was the victim of a home invasion where he and his girlfriend were bound and gagged while intruders stole anything valuable. He also found out that Mark David Chapman made a trip to Woodstock, New York (where Todd lived) looking for him before he killed John Lennon. Chapman was apparently obsessed with Rundgren for a time and may have been trying to kill him.
• Rundgren made a very expensive video for this song that was just the eighth video ever played on MTV. In America, high-budget videos were pretty pointless, since there was nowhere to show them (Devo made the "Whip It" clip because they thought they could sell Laser Discs). Rundgren, however, had a big cash infusion from producing Meat Loaf's wildly successful Bat Out Of Hell album, and he used a lot of the money to start a video studio and make the "Time Heals" promo using innovative computer technology mixed with live action. The result was a kind of surreal backdrop with a moving, blurry Rundgren singing in the foreground. MTV didn't give the video many spins after that first airing.