Singer energetic but more mature
Rick Springfield is back on the circuit
after decade-long hiatus from recording business

Rick Springfield knows how to have a good time.

At his Akron appearance in November, Springfield danced on tables. He did a high-wire act across the Tangier’s back ledge to high-five fans in the back of the room. He smiled and flirted and bounced around like it was 1981 and he was wearing pink tuxedoes and wooing teen-age Jessie’s Girls wannabes.

“I do tend to do that, don’t I?” said Springfield, calling from his Los Angeles home. “I still have a lot of energy. I’m not sure where it comes from, but I use it all up on stage. At the end of the show, sometimes, I think they have to take me back to the hotel on a stretcher.

For nearly a decade, Springfield focused that energy on his acting career and on his family – wife, Barbara and sons Joshua, 13, and Liam, 10.

Last year, he refocused some energy back into music, which had made him a best-seller in the early 1980s with hits like Don’t Talk to Strangers and I’ve Done Everything For You as well as a teen idol. Springfield launched a national club tour, which included two sold-out shows in Northeast Ohio, and wrote songs for his first all-new album since 1988’s Rock of Life.

The resulting record Karma and the accompanying tour, which stops in Cleveland on Thursday at the Great American Rib Cook-Off & Music Festival, marking Springfield’s attempt to reconnect with his audience.

“This is definitely for an older audience – those are the people who will connect to it,” said Springfield. “I think I just write about what’s going on in my life and if that meets with any kind of success, if people are connecting to what I’m thinking, that’s great.”

Though he built his reputation on the power pop sounds of Jessie’s Girl and Love Is Alright Tonite, Springfield looks at his music differently these days.

“I write about more than just (having sex),” he said, laughing. “A lot of what I was writing about in the initial stuff was sexually driven and angst-ridden. That’s just the way you are at that age. My family certain changed me a lot – not that I’m not sexually driven and angst-ridden any more. I just have more concerns.”

One of those concerns is finding more of a spiritual connection in his life.

“I’ve been spiritually searching since the early ‘80s, when my father died,” said Springfield. “It’s shown up before, but this album definitely has a spiritual thread.”

Songs like Religion of the Heart and Prayer provide danceable meditations on the quest to become better people, while Karma and Free talk about the search for finding one’s place in the scheme of things.

“Free is one of the songs that I’m very close to,” said Springfield. “It’s a spiritual love song that I wrote after the death of a 4-year-old boy in our area. It was really weird. I was home alone and I just started writing this song. I really felt like something else was going through me. I get very thankful for things like that. Even if nobody heard that song ever, it was very meaningful to me.”

Another song that means a lot to Springfield is Ordinary Girl, a sweet love song to his wife.

“Having lost people who are close to me, I realize that what I miss most is their ordinariness,” he said. “Everyone tries so hard to be special. But what you end up missing is the little day-to-day things, the general ordinary feelings of being together.”

With its jangly guitar accompaniment, its infectious hook and sweet sentiments, Ordinary Girl would be a sure-fire hit from the likes of Third Eye Blind or Sugar Ray. The same goes for the first single, Itsalwaysomething. But because the songs come from Springfield, they will have a tough time finding a home on the radio.

“It’s certainly a difficult radio market for this (album),” he said. “I can’t really change that. In the end, it’s in the song. When I first came out, people were listening to Barry Manilow and Air Supply. Everyone told me a guitar-oriented rock record wouldn’t work, but it did. The audience found it.”

Springfield is hopeful that Karma will find an audience as well.

“I would like it to be successful,” he said. “It’s my connection with people. And the more people I connect with, the better I feel.”

Heather Conley, of Tallmadge, still feels that connection 18 years after she first discovered his music.

“It’s great when music transcends generations and you can share something like that with your kids,” said Conley, 29, who plans to bring her children to Springfield’s Cleveland concert. “As I have grown, he has also. There’s definite growth in his lyrics now and some spiritualism. His lyrics sometimes are very poignant good ways of describing the world around him and sometimes you hit yourself in the head and say, ‘I never though of it that way.’”

Springfield said he will always play the songs from his heady heyday in the ‘80s.

“I’m forever attached to all my songs,” he said. “They are parts of my life. As trite as some people think the early stuff was, it reflected my life. Don’t Talk to Strangers was about sexual paranoia. But it was also written to the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my two kids.”

Though critics hammered him at the time for being too teeny-bop and for lacking rock credibility became she was also acting on the soap opera General Hospital, Springfield believes his longevity shows they were wrong.

“I wasn’t a kid when I wrote those songs and I don’t look at it shamefully,” he said. “When I wrote My Father’s Chair back in the ‘80s about 90 percent of my audience had not lost someone meaningful. But through the years, as always happens, people lose someone meaningful, and I hear more about people’s reactions to that song and how it helped them get through it, how it helped share the grief.”

These days Springfield is not only enjoying his acting career – with stints on the Brooke Shields sitcom Suddenly Susan and an NBC movie of the week due next season, he is pleased with his rekindled musical career.

When Springfield plays these days, he gets energized by seeing how many people still know the words to his songs and are happy to sing them back to him.

“People are still connected to those songs,” he said. “The way, I look at it, you almost win by default if you hang around long enough.”