Rick Springfield slithers to something darker

Cynical ‘Snake King’ is a long way from ‘Jessie’s Girl’

What would Jessie’s girl say? When Australian heartthrob and

General Hospital star Rick Springfield first sang her praises in 1981, the world responded resoundingly to his impassioned plea and pulse-quickening music. Jessie’s Girl would top the singles charts and earn a Grammy Award for best male rock vocal performance.

But Springfield, 68, has wrestled with a few demons since then, to the extent that the self-portrait he delivers on his latest album probably would baffle the onetime object of his affections, wherever she is.

Set for release Friday, The Snake King assails religion, forecasts the collapse of the ecosystem and blames willful ignorance for hastening our dystopian fate. Springfield even ridicules Jolly Saint Nick on Santa Is an Anagram for his “stupid hat.”

“Well, that’s a little bit of humor,” he explains. “With a song like Suicide Manifesto, I thought we needed it.”

This is true. In the broader context of

The Snake King, this attack on a beloved holiday icon is in fact one of the album’s lighter moments. Another song, Jesus

Was an Atheist, casts the Messiah in an unusual light. (“I was good at stealing silver. He was good at pulling girls.”) And after opening God Don’t Care with the sound of a helicopter and a multitude of people screaming, Springfield insists “I can beat you black and blue — but God don’t care about you.” What brought all this on?

“I see evil everywhere,” he says. “It’s crawling all over the planet. We’re destroying the world as fast as we can. We’re getting to a tipping point where it’s gonna be too late. People talk about aliens coming to save us or whether we can find a habitable planet in some Goldilocks Zone 25 light-years away. Well, that’s not gonna happen. This is it.

“I see evil everywhere. It’s crawling all over the planet. People talk about aliens coming to save us . ... That’s not gonna happen. This is it.”

“I just wonder where God is now. I’ve been thinking about this a long time, and I wanted to do something with those thoughts rather than ‘My baby left me and I feel so bad.’ ”

Feeling bad is central to The Snake

King, though for reasons more cosmic than broken hearts. With an acknowledged history of depression and suicidal thoughts, Springfield decided to use this album to unburden himself of those shadows. Whether he makes any money from it is beside the point.

“I only write for myself,” he insists. “I wouldn’t assume I can teach anybody anything. I’ve always tried to write as honestly as I can, whether it’s about suicide or trying to score with a girl.”

The Snake King mirrors the lyrics’ despair with slithering slide guitar, raw harmonica and echoes of deep Delta blues, evoking Robert Johnson’s mythic flirtations with Satan on The Devil That

You Know and riding a roadhouse shuffle beat on Judas Tree all the way to a final line so provocative you’ll need to play it twice to make sure you heard what you thought you’d heard.

“I’ve always dealt with depression,” Springfield says. “When I think about people who take their own lives, like Robin Williams and Chester Bennington (of Linkin Park), I don’t go, ‘Oh, my God! How could they do that to the people they love?’ I get where they went. And I’m OK with talking about it, because I’ve always believed that whatever I do is not enough, that I’ve got to keep pushing myself to create.”

What does Springfield have to say, then, to fans who may be expecting something less alarming from him?

“I’d like to say I’m very sorry,” he says. Then, after a laugh: “Wait for the next album!”

Springfield, 68, is out with new album “The Snake King” on Friday. MARINA CHAVEZ