It's hard to believe that this year could have been any better for Rick Springfield than the last two, but 1983 may very well be the year to top it all.

He's been free from General Hospital and is concentrating on his first love, music. With the extra time to devote, he is proud of his latest release, Living in Oz, and says it is certainly a departure from his platinum-selling hits Working Class Dog and Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet.

"There are no songs with the word 'girls' in the title," Rick relates. "There are a couple of things that are different. There's a song about this guy and me when we started to play guitars together in Australia, and there's one about a father-son relationship. A couple of the songs approach the trials and tribulations of my love life, but with less adolescence than the last two albums. In the last year, the novelty (of success) has worn off and I've gotten used to the pace. I've been able to start living a proper life again. I'm starting to be more insightful into what my emotions are with relationships and whatever has gone down in the past year."

Not that Rick has just been sitting around these days, mind you. It's just that with his time divided between doing only an album and a film, it seems like a vacation to the man who, it in the last two years, recorded two albums and consistently toured while maintaining a role on General Hospital.

"At the end of '81, I was totally fried. The weekend tours were ball-breakers. We would go to the east coast for a date and then fly back Monday to do General Hospital. I wanted to do it because I had finally gotten a leg in and I didn't want to lose it. So I found the energy from wanting to do it and the excitement of it all."

It's only recently that he's been in the position to devote his energy to strengthening his on-again, off-again relationship with whom he described as "a very special lady".

"At times, it's been very hard to carry on a relationship through what's been going on. I'd thought about being successful for years and I'd figured out pretty much what I thought it would be like and I was pretty correct. But the thing that surprised me the most, was the time element. There was no time for a relationship, so it suffered.

"I refuse to allow the success to isolate me, though. I don't want to feel that cut-off, unreal feeling. I hate that it makes me start to not enjoy what I'm doing. Interaction is important to me and I'll risk going out. Occasionally, you get people hanging out in front of the house and that's really the only thing that is bothersome. My house is where I go just to be me and not have people expect things from me. Still, probably the only home I relax in is my mom's place back in Australia."

It was 1972 when Rick first arrived in America, admittedly "green to the ways of the world." He had come from an area which has a small music scene, only four radio stations and a very family-oriented atmosphere.

"I came over here and suddenly they were talking about the 3,000 radio stations that we had to get all lined up at once. I said, 'What?' And while my managers knew the business, I still think the direction we went in was wrong, but to me it was all new. I'd never heard of a teen magazine. I don't think they had them in Australia at the time, and people started to ask why I was going in teen magazines. My creditability would be doubted, so I just bailed. I don't know whether I did it right or what, but I just knew that I had to get out. It put me in a real depression for a year before I knew what I wanted to do and sorted it all out. Up until that point, I hadn't so much as paid a light bill; I'd never paid rent because it was all paid for and I had stayed in the apartment and written songs. I didn't even have a license until 1975, so I didn't even have a car."

Rick turned to acting lessons when his music career was tied up in litigation, and in 1980, he landed both a role on the soap opera and a RCA recording contract. With two million-selling albums to his credit (and a Grammy for the hit single Jessie's Girl), he maintains that music is still his top priority.

"That's where I started and got into acting as a way of doing something when music was a dead-end for me. I found a real love for it, and it satisfied something in me that music didn't - although I'm not sure what it is. I left General Hospital because I felt two years on it was enough. I learned a lot about myself as an actor on the show and it was meant to be because the timing was just so right.

"Some people still say my music would have probably been taken more seriously by the critics if I hadn't done the soap, but I'm not in this for the critics to say, 'Hey, he's great.' That's not why I'm doing it; I'm doing it for the people who enjoy it and I enjoy what I'm doing. To get a nod from a critic is nice and it gives you a nice warm feeling, and to get a barb still pisses me off, but that's small shit, really. The thrill and enjoyment is doing what I want to do. I love to write and perform and those people who are supporting me are allowing me to do that. It's successful, so I'm allowed to go further."

Springfield has been working on his first feature film about a musician and the struggles within a relationship. He has been allowed creative input and hopes to make the story as realistic as possible.

"I'm real excited about it and really nervous because it's definitely putting it on the line. You're leaving yourself bare-assed and wide open, but I want to go as far as I can in everything - and I don't just mean music or acting. I'd like to have a positive effect on our times. With whatever notoriety I get from music or acting, I want to do something positive with that. I don't figure I'd change someone's life, but I've had letters from people saying that certain songs helped them through. There's stuff that's helped me at times.

"When I was 17 and had just joined my first really professional band, this guy came around selling insurance. He didn't end up selling me insurance, but he told me about this thing called positive thinking that he'd just heard about. He said what you do is set up goals and just head for them and know that they're going to be there. From then on I started to write out goals and sayings that when I'd go through even my hardest times, I know it sounds hokey, but I would plaster things on the walls to stay up. When things were really rough in '75, there was an article on Bob Segar, where he was thinking about all the shit he had gone through and at last he had pulled through. That was a great help to me and I would read it a couple of times a day. If someone does it, then you know it's possible to be done, and even if someone doesn't do it, it's still possible to be done.

"Since that time with the insurance salesman, I've read just about every self-help book there is, most of which are a crock of shit, but the basic attitude in all of them is faith and knowing that it's there. Just see it and go for it and don't worry about how to get there. Your mind will reveal the ways to go; I believe that we all have the absolute power in our mind."
Springfield is living proof of that.