Rick Springfield is the gift that keeps on giving. The Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, musician, actor, and best-selling author who's been wowing fans for more than forty years, says he manifests life and what he wants out of it. And luckily for us, what he wants is to just keep doing what he's doing. “I love what I do, and I think that's the most important thing…I don’t want to sit on the beach and drink mai tais and retire. If I did that, I’d want to get a band together and go and play.” Ironically, while he has no plans to become a beach bum, he is promoting his new rum brand, Beach Bar Rum, with his partner and longtime pal, Sammy Hagar, and a whole heck of a lot of other stuff.
It’s hard to believe this iconic heartthrob is 74, still electrifying on stage and off as he was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he's just released brand new material...his 23rd studio album, and first in five years, Automatic, 20 new songs he wrote, produced, and performed all on his own. Stylistically, he describes it somewhere in between his 1981 certified U.S. platinum Working Class Dog and 1985’s Tao, filled with guitar-based power pop and keyboards. He explains the record's title track he dreamt about. "I'm really not quite sure what it's about. I woke up at three in the morning, wrote down the song I had in my head, got up the next day, and finished it. But it was just kind of stream-of-consciousness stuff. There's a message in there. I just haven't figured out what it is yet.”
Whatever message you take from it, one thing's for certain — you won’t get the poppy tune out of your head or the remaining 19 tracks. His goal, he says — “solid three-minute tunes with the biggest hooks I could come up with.”
Mission accomplished.
The album was engineered by and dedicated to Springfield’s friend and longtime sound man, Matty Spindel, who passed away late last year.
We caught up with Springfield backstage before his New York performance at The Paramount in Huntington last month to hear all about it and more, including his keys to longevity, 39-year marriage to Barbara Porter (who was right there with us during the interview) strategies for positive mental and physical wellness, and his "pretend DJ" gig on SiriusXM.
This is a LifeMinute with the one and only Rick Springfield.
