Maybe he's still pining for "Jessie's Girl," but Rick Springfield has got the blues -- at least on record. The Grammy-winning rocker is releasing The Snake King, his first blues-oriented album, Jan. 26 via Frontiers Music SRL. “All my first bands that I played in as a kid in Australia were blues bands, trying desperately to copy as best we could the amazing music we were hearing coming out of the Chicago blues scene and the older stuff from the deep South,,” said Springfield in a statement. “My guitar playing was always influenced by the same guys who influenced all the English players I grew up with, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, etc. Everyone was playing their version of what they heard from the Southern Blues and the Chicago scene.” Springfield, who has scored 17 top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, has incorporated a handful of his original blues tunes on the road the past two years on his “Stripped Down” tour, and that led to the full collection. “The blues songs are so much fun to play, and they got such a reaction from the audience that I started thinking about including some of that vibe in my next album,” he said. "And with the shape of humanity’s struggle against this amazing planet, I wanted the album to be more lyric driven, so, for better or for worse, it produced The Snake King.” As track “Little Demon” shows, the album gives Springfield a chance to show off a grittier side that he has often displayed in concert and, at more than five minutes, the song lets him stretch out on the bluesy guitar breaks.
