I want my ’80s: Rick Springfield and friends bring tour to the Rose

Grammy award-winning musician, actor, and New York Times best-selling author Rick Springfield is hitting the road this summer for the 2025 edition of his “I Want My ‘80s Tour.”

The 42-city tour will also include special guests John Waite, Wang Chung, Paul Young, and John Cafferty, and features some of the most iconic songs of the 1980s: “Jessie’s Girl,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “Missing You,” “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” “Every Time You Go Away,” and “On the Dark Side.”

The “I Want My 80s Tour” will be making a stop June 23 at the Rose Music Center in Huber Heights. Tickets are on sale now.

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Earlier this year, Springfield announced his latest compilation, “Big Hits: Rick Springfield’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2.” It’s Springfield’s latest career-spanning retrospective chronicling his more recent output, from 1999’s “Karma” through his 2023 album, “Automatic.” A new single, “Lose Myself,” is also included on the comp, as well as a punchier re-recording of “Jessie’s Girl.”

Though he had several culture-permeating hits in the 1980s, Springfield says the albums he’s made the past two decades have been the best work he’s done musically. “Greatest Hits, Volume 2” is a collection of fan favorites boiled down to one double album.

When asked what’s changed in his songwriting that makes his current work his best work, he simply said that there’s more to write about now. At 75, he is not, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, going gently into that good night.

“I think about a lot more things. I have a lot more issues,” Springfield said. “I’ve written about my life and not just about not getting laid, because a lot of the early stuff was, honestly… sexual angst and all that. I’ve written a lot about my depression, relationships that didn’t work, people I’ve lost, who died. It’s amazing, really, that the older you get, the more there seems to be to write about.”

Springfield’s also gotten darker as he’s aged, shying away from the “shiny guy back in the 80s” and embracing the heaviness that was previously hidden under the surface of many of the major chord pop tunes he’s known for.

“The stuff that’s meaningful to write about is dark,” he said. “When I’m really happy, I generally don’t want to write.”

Wang Chung, perhaps best known for the song suggesting everybody both “have fun” and “Wang Chung” tonight, also recently released a career-retrospective double-LP: “Clear Light/Dark Matter.” The compilation features what singer Jack Hues calls “all the big hits and near misses,” including rarities, remixes, outtakes, demos, and a previously unfinished track called “Separate Lives.”

Wang Chung has been working on the idea of rereleasing the back catalog for years. With “Clear Light/Dark Matter,” we get a window into Wang Chung’s creative process — through reissues and alternate versions.

“I think about how rock music, the genre in the broadest sense, is going to be preserved in the future,” Hues said. “Classical music, you have the scores of the composers that you can go back to revive the whole thing. With jazz, you’ve also got written music to make it reborn each time it’s performed. But with rock music, it tends to be very much related to recordings. So to go back to the early stages, that, in a sense, will be the way that the music gets preserved and handed down through the generations.”

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Springfield, Wang Chung, John Waite, Paul Young, and John Cafferty were essential parts of the 1980s zeitgeist. But the enduring quality of the hit songs can still be heard, buffet of bands-style, in era-specific tours like “I Want My 80s.” And though the bands typically stick to the hits on these tours, there’s always the possibility that the lesser-known songs — the more artistically satisfying ones for those playing them — may be on the set lists, too.

“I took time off in the late 80s and 90s,” Springfield said. “When I came back and started playing, I was concerned if the energy of the audience was going to be there because I’d only ever had that. I didn’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t. But it was, and it still seems to be there. It’s amazing that we’re still rocking at this age.”

As Jack Hues put it, “it is like time travel, certainly from the past.”

Brandon Berry writes about the Dayton and Southwest Ohio music and art scene. Have a story idea for him? Email branberry100@gmail.com.