Rick Springfield contemplated suicide last year as he continued to battle against the depression issues that have followed him all his adult life. The topic arose during an interview with Sirius XM’s Feedback as he discussed the inspirations behind his new album The Snake King, which is coming out on Jan. 26, and how music could be a “balm” when “darkness is on your back.”

As reported by Billboard, Springfield, who revealed in his 2011 autobiography Late Late at Night that he’d attempted suicide when he was 17, discussed his new track “Suicide Manifesto” by saying, “Last year I was close to it. I was really close to it.” He added that when he heard about recent celebrity suicides, including those of Chris Cornell last May and Chester Bennington last July, “I didn’t go, ‘Ugh, that’s terrible.’ I went, ‘I get it.’ I get being that lost and dark.”

As you can hear in the audio below, Springfield said that his depression was "alive and well" inside him. "Anyone says, ‘How you doing?’ I never go, ‘Great,’ because it’s bulls---. I go, ‘I’m okay, you know. I’m there.’ Sometimes I’ll surely go, ‘F---ing horrible, I’ve had a terrible day.’ They’ll go, ‘Great, man, great. Me too.’ They won’t even hear it. … We’ve all had the social front and it just makes me feel like such a liar when I go home and I look in the mirror and go, ‘Really? You said that to somebody, that everything’s great and you’re feeling awesome? That’s bulls---, man.’”

He said the reason he’d written and recorded The Snake King was, “I wanna do what’s truthful. … There’s a lot of music I wouldn’t write now because it’s not truthful.” Citing his signature hit “Jessie’s Girl” he explained, “I was 29 when I wrote that and I was single. I have different things I worry about now rather than getting laid. I have to write about those, which is why this album is the way it is.”

He noted that, these days, he meditates to temporarily relieve his depression. “Meditation is the only thing that takes me out of it. If I truly meditate and focus and get to that place, I’m not depressed, no matter what’s going on. But it’s pretty hard.”

 

 

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