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Rick Springfield On World Cafe

Rick Springfield
Elizabeth Attenborough
/
Courtesy of the artist
Rick Springfield

When an artist has a hit as huge as "Jessie's Girl," from 1981's Working Class Dog, they can become immortalized in pop culture memory and maybe even frozen in time. They can get flattened, too. But we all know that there's much more to a career artist than the big hit, and there's more to a person than what they do for a living. Rick Springfield has released 16 albums since Working Class Dog,including his latest, a blues rock-inspired record called The Snake King that gets frank about God, depression and demons.

When Springfield was a teen, he attempted suicide. Surviving that led the artist to believe that he was destined to make music. He did just that. Shortly afterwards, Springfield spent six months entertaining troops in Vietnam and in his early band Zoot. Thanks to "Jessie's Girl," he became Rick Springfield the rock star. This was right around the time he became Rick Springfield the soap opera star thanks to his role of Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital in the 1980s.

We speak about some of those storied periods in his life and Springfield performs live music from The Snake King. Hear it all in the player above.

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Talia Schlanger hosts World Cafe, which is distributed by NPR and produced by WXPN, the public radio service of the University of Pennsylvania. She got her start in broadcasting at the CBC, Canada's national public broadcaster. She hosted CBC Radio 2 Weekend Mornings on radio and was the on-camera host for two seasons of the television series CBC Music: Backstage, as well as several prime-time music TV specials for CBC, including the Quietest Concert Ever: On Fundy's Ocean Floor. Schlanger also guest hosted various flagship shows on CBC Radio One, including As It Happens, Day 6 and Because News. Schlanger also won a Canadian Screen Award as a producer for CBC Music Presents: The Beetle Roadtrip Sessions, a cross-country rock 'n' roll road trip.