Karma

by Stephen Thomas ErlewineAfter nearly ten years of silence, Rick Springfield returned to recording in the late '90s, releasing Karma in the last year of the decade. A lot can happen in ten years, and it's to Springfield's credit that he refuses to ignore the changes while building on his bedrock sound. While it evokes classic Springfield, Karma is certainly the work of a more mature artist. At times, it's a self-consciously mature artist -- the lyrical subjects are usually serious, for instance -- but it's nice to hear him add layers of acoustic guitars and keyboards. That's not to say that he doesn't rock at all on the record, but the majority of the album is, for want of a better phrase, thinking man's AOR -- music made by an aging arena rocker for his aging fans. And that's the reason why the album works. It doesn't try to recapture the exuberance of Working Class Dog, yet it stays true to that music while being the work of a rocker approaching 50. For longtime fans, that alone makes Karma worth hearing. [Karma was released in America several months after its initial release in Japan. The American edition eliminated the acoustic re-recording of "Jessie's Girl," which was a bonus track on the Japanese disc, but it did contain two new songs -- "Big Beautiful Friday Night" and the spoken "His Last Words" -- that didn't appear on the initial release.]