On the road promoting his new album 'Songs for the End of the World,' reaping praise for his appearance in Dave Grohl's 'Sound City,' and preparing to star in a documentary that looks back on his long career, Rick Springfield is enjoying some of his most widespread acclaim in years.

Springfield reflected on his resurgence during a recent interview with Popdose, chuckling about how dubstep colored some of the sounds on the new record and adding, "I still listen to a lot of the new stuff and I’m still inspired by a lot of the new stuff. When I feel like I’ve written something good, it’s the most exciting thing for me. It’s like getting a new girlfriend -- it’s like everything great about that. So I guess there’s still a real charge to me to write."

He picked up some of that charge jamming with Grohl and the Foo Fighters during 'Sound City,' the acclaimed documentary about the studio where Springfield recorded some of his biggest hits. Acknowledging that "it’s always a little bit nerve-wracking" to step in and play with someone else's band, he added that "In the end we were just a bunch of kids in a garage cranking up our amps and jamming. That’s basically what you do, and you go 'oh, I like this' and 'I like it like that' and then you pull pieces out that you like. We had the lucky thing of it being a studio so that we could record them and then listen back and go 'that works' or 'that doesn’t work' and make a song from there."

Talk of 'Studio City' brought the conversation around to the albums Springfield recorded there -- including 'Living in Oz,' which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Sharing some stories from the sessions, he reflected, "It was a very tense time. It was the third album and the second one kind of rides on the strength of the first one, so the third one is the one that says 'will I be here tomorrow or is this pretty much it?' So there was a lot riding on that record for me...There are a lot of great memories and we recorded through the board that Dave Grohl bought, and it’s really part of the whole history of that board."

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