Jesse's Girl - Rick Springfield

I’ve decided to do a series of posts about good songs residing among hugely popular, so popular as to be considered cheesily clichéd, music. Bottom line: sorry hipsters and alternative music purists, radio overplay and massive popularity are not universal markers of bad music (just most of the time).

Aspiring songwriters could learn a lot from Rick Springfield (in fact I wish most “singer-songwriters” I’ve ever heard in my life actually had). Springfield created beautifully crafted (and in most cases perfectly produced) pop songs, period. Whereas most songwriters are lucky to write a hook or two in their entire career, most of Springfield’s hits have three or more hooks per song. Do yourself a favor and pick up Rick’s Greatest Hits and listen to any of the following songs: Don’t Talk to Strangers, What Kind of Fool Am I, Human Touch, Love Somebody, Bop ‘Til You Drop.

Which brings us to Rick’s greatest hit, Jesse’s Girl (video below), which in 1981 dominated the US charts for a long time. Why most people liked it at the time, I don’t know. Why I liked it then and now, is that it is simply one of the best pop songs ever made in the rock idiom. Songs this good are immune to overplay in my brain. I could listen to them forever.

The genius in this song begins immediately: the basic guitar riff is simple but perfect, immediately guiding us into the initial verse hook. The verse has a B part that introduces a new vocal hook, with nice high harmonies. (Only Springfield could work the lyric “And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it.” into a single line so seamlessly.) Then we have the central hook of the chorus. After the second chorus a completely new hook enters that you would have to call a bridge. Then we return to the guitar riff underneath the chorus, which works as a kind of new intro, ushering in the most cleanly-entering guitar solo you’ll ever hear (according to the video, played by Springfield himself. The guy is one of the most fascinating figures of his era: Australian pop star, international TV star, rock star, and he writes his own songs and plays both rhythm and lead guitar on them. I wanted to be him when I was 14. I still want to be him.) This penchant to introduce an entirely new musical hook in the middle or toward the end of a song is reflected in some of his other hits and is seen in several songs by Journey, another artist on whom undeserving scorn is heaped by people who simply know nothing about good music.

This is great music folks. Empirical fact. Listen and learn.