'80s heartthrob brings final leg of tour to Tucson

“(The show) is really boring and nobody plays well,” he deadpanned. “We do a bunch of old ‘60s songs that nobody’s heard so basically it’s really not worth going to. I would advise everybody to stay home, save your money.”

Try telling that to what is sure to be a sold-out theater come showtime at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. His fans, who we think we’re safe in guestimating will lean more toward women than men, had snatched up all but 100 or so tickets as of early this week.

If you’ve ever seen him live, you know that Springfield, 74, puts on a great show, drawing from his 20-plus studio albums going back to his 1972 debut “Beginnings” that he released in his native Australia.

“I have a great band. They kill it,” he said a few minutes later. “I love playing with them. They’re all good friends. The traveling sucks, but we love playing. And Arizona is close so no worries about that.”

His show Thursday will be his first in Tucson post-pandemic. He was here last in 2018 with Loverboy at Casino del Sol’s AVA.

He comes here with his months-old album “Automatic,” which is his first studio album since 2016’s “Rocket Science.” It also is his first career double album and one that Springfield said he recorded on his own in his home studio in California.

“I would go out and write a song then record the whole thing, then go out and write a song and come in and record it,” he said. “And I just did that until I ran out of songs.”

The album has no through line; it’s more reflecting on life and remembering friends who he’s lost and lessons he’s learned and unlearned.

“I hope (listeners) enjoy it. I do it to connect … I write for myself, but in the end you put it out to share it with people, to share your thoughts and hoping it helps cheer them up or give them strength or whatever,” he said. “There’s no real theme other than I wrote a song about this and I wrote a song about that.”

During his Rialto show , Springfield will play just the title track from “Automatic” on a setlist that will draw heavily from his earlier albums. Of course, no Springfield show is complete without his ubiquitous monster hit “Jessie’s Girl.” The fact that that song has stood the test of generations is not entirely surprising, he said. It’s more a testament of a bygone era where music meant more than just topping charts.

“I think people who come from the generation when we were kind of the same, I think there’s a longing for the past, a longing for a time when the world was safer and you felt more things were possible,” he said, adding that there’s a bit of nostalgia for his older fans to hear him perform “Jessie’s Girl” live.

“It’s very rewarding,” he said, “but when I do a TV interview to promote my new album and they play ‘Jessie’s Girl’ as a walk on, I’m like, ‘Really?’ It’s a double-edge sword.”

Tucson’s Birds & Arrows will open Thursday’s show at 7:30 p.m. at the Rialto, 318 E. Congress St. Tickets are $67-$151 through rialtotheatre.com.