It was August of 1979 when Rick Springfield first wrote down the words that would turn into the lyrics of his breakout hit “Jessie’s Girl.” And to this day, it’s a song that his hardcore fans continue to devour.
But never did the Grammy Award-winning rocker think someone would put a Shakespearean twist on the song about his best friend’s girl.
“I always like when people take a different take on something you’ve written,” Springfield says about the Renaissance translation of “Jessie’s Girl” he recently posted, which rewrites the song’s chorus as, “For Jessie’s winsome girl I long have pined / pray, tell me where I’ll such a woman find!”
“I’m always interested in seeing a different version of it,” he added with a laugh. “And that was certainly an original take.”
And while Springfield can’t pinpoint who actually did the viral translation, he wonders aloud if it could have been some sort of artificial intelligence concoction in a world somewhat foreshadowed in the Aussie’s 1983 pop hit “Human Touch.”
“There’s the fear that [AI] will take over and kill us all,” Springfield chuckles before his voice seems to trail off towards the somewhat unsettling possibilities playing ping-pong in his head. “AI will probably do a better job taking care of the Earth than we did, so I say bring it.”
Though the ultimate role of artificial intelligence in music and songwriting remains to be seen, Springfield isn’t too worried.
“A computer will never have a soul, no matter how smart it gets or how self-preserving and self-aware it gets,” says the 74-year-old rocker, who’s heading to Aurora’s RiverEdge Park on Aug. 31 as part of the “I Want My ’80s Tour.”
“And that’s where the connection is. That’s why [music] hits everybody in a place they can’t explain. I mean, there’s a soul in songwriting that even songwriters don’t understand.”
Leading with this soul has served as a driving force throughout Springfield’s career, a soul that finds itself illuminated on a string of hits such as 1983’s “Affair of the Heart” and 1982’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers” as much as it is on deeper cuts such as “World Start Turning” and “State of the Heart.”
“I think being a writer with depression has certainly had me looking inwards a lot earlier than when I was supposed to,” says Springfield, whose father’s death in 1981 inspired a number of the singer’s greatest pieces of work, including the touching “My Father’s Chair.”
“I think that moment of watching my dad die the first time (his dad was 51 years old when his heart stopped, but eventually was resuscitated) changed my writing. I started to write about stuff that I was experiencing rather than made-up relationships with girls or relationships I never had.”
Springfield continues to pull from that deep and personal well on his new album “Automatic,” an EDM-inspired, pulsating puzzle of music that Springfield stylistically places somewhere between “Working Class Dog” and “Tao.”
“I’ve been listening to a lot of EDM stuff,” says Springfield of the inspirations behind the lofty project that serves as his first new studio album since 2018.
“They’re still my songs, but with a slightly different approach. It’s just that I like a big kick drum, and I love sound effects and I love playing keyboard and guitar. So that’s just how it came out.”
And the way his life has always played out, with him following the road put in front of him, might soon have him writing another book.
“I have notes,” admits Springfield, whose books “Late, Late at Night: A Memoir” and “Magnificent Vibration” both scored him a spot on the New York Times bestseller’s list. “I have a bunch of stuff written. I just need to kind of focus. Twenty songs [on ‘Automatic’] has maybe drained me for a little while as far as songwriting goes. I hope there is another book in me, but you can’t force it. If you don’t have the inspiration, you don’t have the inspiration.”
But he won’t be heading to AI anytime soon for any sort of assist.
“AI will get better and better, and probably there will come times when a computer will write a song that will actually be a good song,” he says. “But if it happens, it will just come from knowledge. You’re not going to write anything that touches anybody just from knowledge. You have to have a soul in it.”
