Interview: Rick Springfield

Renowned psychotherapist Virginia Satir once said individuals should not allow other peoples’ limited perceptions define them. Rick Springfield has definitely embraced that mantra throughout a career dating back roughly six decades since he first plugged in a guitar.

His cultural imprint can be found on the singles charts, the soap opera landscape and in other roles that have found him popping up on prime-time television, Broadway and on the silver screen. Through it all, the 75-year-old native of Australia has never abandoned his first love of playing guitar and is still recording new material while still accommodating a diehard fanbase with hits that date back to the early 1980s.

Springfield’s latest move is headlining the “I Want My ‘80s Tour,” a package tour that finds him headlining a bill with a handful of peers from that decade. He’s excited to be part of the package tour.

“We’re going to have wall-to-wall hits played by some great bands and artists,” he said in an early May interview. “Wang Chung, who I was a fan of in the ‘80s is on the bill along with John Waite, who is a good friend and who I think has one of the best rock voices. Paul Young is also coming out on the road as well. I was a fan of (his) and actually brought his bass player out from England after I heard him play on some of my songs. There is a lot of love there.”

Springfield began reaching a wide audience in 1981 as both a guitar-slinging pop star and a soap opera heartthrob. That was the year his fifth studio album, the multi-platinum “Working Class Dog” hit the racks at the same time “General Hospital” became a must-see soap opera. The former yielded a handful of hits (“Jessie’s Girl,” “I’ve Done Everything for You,” “Love is Alright Tonight”) along with a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. The latter found Springfield playing fictional playboy Dr. Noah Drake, a role that calcified a teen idol image he neither wanted nor sought.

“It’s been a double-edged sword,” he said of his dual success in music and acting. “When I first started out, everyone thought I was this daytime one-dimensional guy who someone handed a song to and happened to stay in tune for three minutes in the studio. And then ‘Jessie’s Girl’ was right there and it’s a natural thing to think the two go together. They don’t and never have. They wanted me to sing on my original appearances of “General Hospital” and I knew it was going to be a problem with me being on the show because it was becoming so successful. I was just doing it for the money.

“It just happened that summer, it became THE show around the same time ‘Jessie’s Girl’ went to number one. They’ll probably be forever entwined even though they aren’t from where they were born and everything. They are two very disparate children joined in fame I guess,” Springfield explained with a laugh.

Springfield’s musical roots go back to growing up in a remote part of Australia where his family didn’t even own a television. Instead they entertained themselves by singing show tunes together. (“We’d sit around the piano and play ‘Surrey With the Fringe On Top,’ ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘Carousel’ and all those kinds of tunes, which I loved and still love,” Springfield said.) His love affair with guitar came when he was 13 at a time when his Australian Army career officer father was briefly stationed in England. That’s when Springfield was exposed to instrumental outfit The Shadows and that band’s hugely influential guitarist Hank Marvin.

Following a brief stint in Australian pop group Zoot, Springfield landed a record deal that yielded the minor hit “Speak to the Sky.” A move to the United States to pursue more musical opportunities in mid-1972 found trying to find his footing and survive. Acting proved to be a lifeline for him during a very trying time.

“I was between record deals and getting pretty hungry and low on money,” he said. “I met a woman and (she) said to come to this acting class if I wasn’t doing anything. I started taking acting classes and that really saved my life. I was by myself at the time, kind of all alone in America and it really brought life back to me. I started working as an actor and was one of the last contract players signed by Universal. ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ was my first role and I ended up doing ‘Rockford Files,’ ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and tens of nameless shows most people don’t even remember. It was good practice and it helped me a lot. It actually paid the light bill.”

Over his career, Springfield has refused to rest on his laurels. He’s still recording new material, with his last studio record being 2023’s double-CD “Automatic.” (“Twenty songs of dark to happy stuff -- a chronicle of what I’ve been going through and thinking about,” he said.)

One lifelong struggle the singer-songwriter has been grappling with is depression. Transcendental meditation and plenty of self-reflection have helped him cope and he often shares his experiences during his concerts.

“I feel a lot better [lately] and have been working on it,” Springfield said. “I talk about it in my show every night because I think it’s an important thing to talk about it and I know what it is. It’s been with me since I was 16. I’m doing better with it. It hasn’t always been that way, but I’m doing better with it.”

Throughout Springfield’s very rich career, his creative drive has been unabated, as evidenced by the 2024 release of “Big Hits: Rick Springfield’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.” Comprised of material starting with 1999’s “Karma” up through the aforementioned “Automatic,” this double-CD anthology reflects the rather wide stylistic net Springfield casts whenever he hits the studio.

“There are a lot of those songs that are fan favorites and a lot of songs that I think are the best ones from the past 20 years,” Springfield said. “(It includes) some unreleased stuff like one I did with Sammy Hagar called ‘Party at the Beach Bar.’ There is also a song with the Foo Fighters called ‘The Man That Never Was,’ a new single called ‘Lose Myself’, and ‘Jessie’s Girl’ because we threw it on there as a re-recording. It sounds like the original, only bigger and stronger.”