Former pop idol Springfield still having fun

Rick Springfield wishes he had written the Beatles' song "No One."

He wishes his pen had been firmly pressed to paper on Foreigner's swoony ballad "Waiting for a Girl Like You" or the somber Mister Mister ballad "Broken Wings." Oh, he nearly wishes aloud, to have been the scribe behind Human League's pop ditty "Human" and Gerry Rafferty's jazzy "Baker Street."

"These are songs I had always liked," Springfield said in a phone call from a Milwaukee concert stop. "These are songs basically that I wish I had written."

So in an inspired moment of downtime, Springfield dusted off those songs from his youth - the formative 1970s-1980s when he was in his 20s making his own mark on pop music - and put his stamp on them.

In July, he will release his self-recorded disc, "The Day After Yesterday," a collection of 14 cover tunes that touched him 30 years ago and still touches him now.

"I'm certainly not the first one to have done it, but it's a unique bunch of songs," he says of the album, recorded on his own label, Gomer Records. "I picked songs that were a little more under the radar. They're not played a lot still, like 'Life in a Northern Town' by Dream Academy that I really loved. People go, 'I don't remember that song,' then they hear it and go, 'Oh, yeah, that one.' Those kind of songs."

Springfield promises he'll do a couple of those songs when he performs Saturday at Desert Diamond Casino.

He'll squeeze them in between his classic hits like "Jessie's Girl," "Don't Talk to Strangers," "Affair of the Heart," "Wait for the Night" and "Love Is Alright Tonite" - 17 Top 40 hits in a decade from the late 1970s and 1980s when the singer-turned-actor Australia native was one of the hottest teen idols of the day.

Springfield, 55, took time off in the 1990s to be a full-time father to his two sons. He returned to recording and touring in 1998 and hasn't looked back.

It's fun. I love it. We'll do it as long as it's fun," he vows. "When it starts getting tiring and not fun, I'll stop."

Springfield seems to be having lots of fun on "Yesterday," adding a barely audible fingerprint to each song.

"Unless I had something to offer, I pretty much stayed true enough to the original because that's what I liked about them was the arrangement," he says. "We did 'Baker Street,' the old Gerry Rafferty song, and I even played the original solo because for me that was one of the highlights of the song."