By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

RICK SPRINGFIELD – TAO (1985)

Okay, I promise this is the last of the Rick Springfield albums I plan to write about, at least for a while. I said that I wanted to dig into some of his back catalog and I figure four albums is a pretty good start at that task.

The Tao album is Springfield’s tenth studio album and when I started looking up information about it online, the album’s Wikipedia page has an extensive quote from Springfield where he says that the lyrics on the release are the darkest of his career.

Not that one hopes for that kind of reasoning behind the songwriting but it did key my interest a little bit to pay attention during my listening sessions. After all, this was the first time I’d heard the album in full.

I have to say I wasn’t all that crazy about the way the opening track “Dance This World Away”. It was just kind of annoying to me. But once the song built into a more in-your-face rocker, it really took off. The music is a mix between hard rock and a kind of synth pop music sound but while the music is in its uptempo gear everything works in unison. I liked the hook that draws you in during the chorus a lot. The female vocal from Edie Lehmann also works perfectly as a counterpoint to Springfield’s vocal.

On the album’s Wikipedia page, there’s a mention of one outlet that described “Celebrate Youth” as a “slamming rocker” and an “impassioned anthem”.  I have to say that I would agree. This song has a real aggressive bent to it. Whether in the main lyrical passages or the song’s chorus, the lyrics give Springfield quite the forum for his hard driving vocal performance. This one is a killer track!

The song “State of the Heart” is a mid-tempo kind of track. It hits that groove right from the start and even when you get to the chorus, the song’s pacing barely goes up even a notch. I don’t remember if I’d heard this song before now but while there’s nothing outright “wrong” with the track, it didn’t really grab my attention all that much. It just seemed a little too sedate for me.

But that momentary disappointment faded quickly once the song “Written in Rock” started. Springfield gets back to the more hard driving side of his music. The song chorus is killer but that could really be said about pretty much the entire set of song lyrics. The drums come through big and poundingly heavy on this track and you get not just a great vocal take from Springfield but some great guitar playing as well. This is another of the album’s stand out tracks for sure.

The first side of Tao closes out with the song “The Power of Love (The Tao of Love)”. The track has a steadying musical sound in the background for the most part. But built over that is a kind of atmospheric setting that benefits greatly from the additional more uptempo moments of the song. Between the instrumentation and the passionate delivery from Springfield, the song ended up becoming a very interesting song to listen to overall.

The second side of the album kicks off with “Walking on the Edge” which was just a bit weird for its intro. The intro is well over a minute long and while it first moves to establish an atmospheric feel, it gets a little weird when a spoken word (however muddled by technology) piece sounds like we are about to watch an old science fiction movie. Thankfully, once that intro ends, the song turns into more of an upbeat and uptempo track. It’s got a rocking tone to it, though a keyboard sound plays a huge role in the song as well. It’s this part of the song that really drew me in after my initial impression of that intro.

“Walk Like a Man” starts off a tad slow but after the initial verse, the pacing picks up into more of an explosive rocker. Springfield’s lyrics delve into things in the world that were hitting him hard at the point of his biggest commercial peak. Those topics are a bit heavier than one might usually expect but when he builds a solid rocker track around those lyrical concepts, you get a damn good track.

I don’t know if the album needed TWO tracks with the word ‘Tao’ in it but “The Tao of Heaven” would be a good argument against it. Even though the song is just under ninety seconds long, it felt like a dirge to me and I really just could’ve done without it and just skipped ahead to the next song.

That song, “Stranger in the House”, turned out to be a pretty interesting song. The song alternates between a mid tempo pace and a bit more of a rocking tone in the song’s chorus. I like the way the song’s lyrics are less about an actual stranger in the house and more like two people who have slowly become strangers to each other instead. It is an excellent concept and I thought this one turned out pretty cool.

The album closes out with “My Father’s Chair”, which finds Rick Springfield dealing once again with the passing of his father and the relationship the two of them had. The core of the music is built around a piano track. You can hear the trouble he was having dealing with the loss of his dad. It’s a beautiful track and very engaging. For me, it supercedes the “April 24, 1981” song on Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet album, which first addressed this difficult topic.

I think Tao is a pretty good album. I won’t say that I dug it as a whole more than Living in Oz, but there are some killer tracks here that I would love to hear Springfield dig out for a headlining concert set sometime soon.

Since this is the fourth album I’ve written about from Rick Springfield’s catalog in recent weeks, I should say that I have really come to appreciate all that I missed out on back in the day. While I do have a CD edition of the album The Snake King in my collection, this will likely be the last album I write about for The Cassette Chronicles. But don’t think that means I’m going to stop exploring more of Springfield’s discography on my own. Because as these four albums have shown me, there’s a lot to check out and a lot to enjoy and I want to continue doing more of both.

NOTES OF INTEREST: The Tao album peaked at #21 on the album charts and hit the Gold record certification for sales. I think you kind of have to take it as a sign of Springfield’s diminishing sales figures as it was less than his last three albums.

The song “State of the Heart” was originally written and recorded by the Australian group Mondo Rock. It was a hit in Australia but Springfield’s version (which changed the song structure around a bit) was minor hit in the US and a few other countries. It peaked as a single in the US for Springfield at #22.