Grammy winner Springfield takes on religion with new album

For some fans Rick Springfield will always be handsome, footloose-and-fancy-free Dr. Noah Drake on “General Hospital.” For others he’s the rocker who wishes he had “Jessie’s Girl.” The daytime soap opera and his Top 40 hits of the 1980s will always be important entries on his resume, but when Springfield opens his debut performance at the Blue Note Hawaii Saturday, he’ll be channeling a different concept: the music and persona from his just-released hard-rock-and-blues album, “The Snake King.”

With “The Snake King,” released in January, Springfield shows a alchemist’s skill in blending electric blues and rock ’n’ roll, and also pushes the boundaries of polite conversation, as rock ’n’ roll often will.

A couple of songs — try “Little Demon” and “The Voodoo House” — are pretty much straightforward sex songs, but others confront the listener with lyrics challenging the foundations of Christian faith. For instance, if Jesus had to die to redeem the world from sin, then why is Judas a villain? And, what did Jesus do in the years between his visit to the temple when he was 12 and the beginning of his ministry 18 years later? If Jesus was on earth in human form, did he not live as a human man?

Springfield describes the songs as “questioning.”

“I was raised Christian, of course, but I’ve been looking around the world and seeing all this evil and wondering where God is,” Springfield said recently during a conference call arranged through his publicist’s office in Los Angeles. “That’s where songs like ‘God Don’t Care’ and ‘Jesus Was an Atheist’ came from.

“I had to get some of that stuff out in some songs. Hopefully its not preachy, but done with a sense of humor and prodding people to think about what they believe. I thought the blues-rock approach was the right approach to say these things.”

The 13 songs were placed on his album in the order he intended them to be heard, he said: “There’s links and all kinds of things between the songs, and it’s an overall story. Listening to any one song (at random), you don’t get the overall view of the record.”

The “overall story” builds to the 12th song, a magnum opus titled “Orpheus in the Underworld.” Springfield’s lyrics go as deep as Dylan used to go with cryptic imagery, caustic commentary and references to individuals and entities as diverse as Goldman Sachs, the Koch brothers, the Virgin Mary, “the last Jewish man in Pakistan” and Mr. Ed.

“I’ve tried to write ‘Orpheus’ interpretively so that people hopefully get their own thoughts from it, rather than writing completely on the nose,” he said. “That was a bit of a challenge, but fun for me to do through stream of consciousness.”

Some of the lyric images might offend people who are “pretty much stuck in their ways and they don’t tolerate anyone else’s thoughts,” Springfield acknowledged, but the album shouldn’t been seen as anti-Christian.

“It’s just a prodding,” he said. “I have crosses all over my house, and I have a cross tattooed on my body, so (Christianity) is very much as part of me, but there’s a lot of friggin’ questions with what is happening in the world.

“I was raised thinking that God was this father figure that handed out favors when he felt like it and kicked your ass when you were bad. That always frustrated me as a kid, and I didn’t like that feeling — which is why I turned to the East and started meditating. The East puts God within you, and the way I was raised, God was an exterior force. A lot of that frustration is what drove some of these songs.”

“THE SNAKE KING” is the latest chapter in a career that began in the early ’60s when Springfield was a teenager and playing guitar with bands in England and his native Australia. He had some moderate success in Australia in the early 1970s, was defined for a moment as a teenybopper pop idol, and survived the experience to have a colorful and diverse career as an actor and sometime recording artist through the end of the decade.

Springfield broke out big in 1981 when “Jessie’s Girl” topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart while he was also starring as Dr. Noah Drake on “General Hospital.” In the years that followed, Springfield continued to record while appearing in films and television shows. He was also an original member of the Broadway cast of the jukebox musical “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” made several return appearances on “General Hospital” and was Meryl Streep’s leading man in the 2015 romantic comedy “Ricki and the Flash.”

“Jessie’s Girl” earned him a Grammy for best male rock vocal performance in 1981; more Billboard Top 10 hits include “An Affair of the Heart,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “I’ve Done Everything for You” and “Love Somebody.” A fifth hit single, “Human Touch,” peaked at No. 18.

Springfield’s sense of humor earned him another hit single in 1984 when his record label rereleased a recording he’d made in 1978. Back then there there were people who confused “Springfield” with “Springsteen.” The song, titled “Bruce,” described situations where people assumed he was Springsteen — asking for his autograph, for instance, and then telling him, “I thought ‘Born to Run’ was one of your best.”

“Bruce” reached No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

Catching up on some old history, Springfield said that although he has gotten to know several members of Springsteen’s band over the years, he has never meet Springsteen. Furthermore, he said matter-of-factly, Springsteen has never acknowledged the shout-out.

Springfield also confirmed that, yes, Oprah Winfrey really did try to find the woman who inspired “Jessie’s Girl” and that her investigators discovered that the teacher of the class had died and all the class records had been destroyed.

Springfield has said over the years that he never actually met the girlfriend of his friend — he only admired her from afar — and that his friend was not named Jessie. No one has ever contacted him claiming to be “the girl,” Springfield said, and, as far as he knows, the guy he was so jealous of way back when still doesn’t know that he is “Jessie.”