Venus in Overdrive

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Venus in Overdrive was recorded in a record 32 days by Springfield and Matt Bissonette, Springfield's long time bass player. According to Rick, "it is an album about love in all its forms, and since Venus is the goddess of love, it's called Venus in Overdrive. There is a lot of personal stuff in these songs but we have tried to craft them so they still have a universal voice. We are older, yet still teenagers, we have lost people we love and still love the people who are on our journey with us, we are angry at some of the crap in the world yet love our human failings."

The first single from Venus in Overdrive is "What's Victoria's Secret?" Rick says the title of the song "is one of those titles that was waiting to be written and we just got there first. Matt came up with it and we wrote the song while we were doing 5 nights of shows in Milwaukee. I had some recording gear brought into my hotel room and we wrote it there at the haunted Pfister hotel, room 804. It's basically about the sexualization of women and how we as males, want that, but also resist it and mainly need to connect to women as human beings. It's a dichotomy that most men feel I think."

Two songs on the record, "Saint Sahara" and "Oblivious," pay tribute to Sahara Aldridge, a young girl who frequently attended Rick's shows and whom the entire band came to love and who recently passed away. Rick explains that "Saint Sahara" "is about who Sahara was and how hard it was to have her leave. It's also a celebration and recognition of the people she affected in this world. Her mom said (before she died) that if I were to write a song about her daughter, could I make it a celebration and not something maudlin, so it's basically a song celebrating her great sprit. `Oblivious,' is the soul side of the song, `Saint Sahara,' what we all felt and how we dealt with it. It is sometimes so good to be numb to pain but life can't go on if you stay numb all the time. The song itself is about the denial of the finality of death, but it's still a love song."

As part of the promotional plan for the new album, Rick will be returning to "General Hospital" in July as Dr. Noah Drake and his alter ego rocker Eli Love. The storyline will reunite him with the characters of Robin, Patrick and Anna as well as allow him to perform the single, "What's Victoria's Secret?"

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