SPRINGFIELD FINDS HIS WAY--ALMOST

“TAO.” Rick Springfield. RCA. Once you quit holding Rick Springfield’s good looks and soap-opera success against him, you’re left with a passionate and canny pop-rocker who’s maybe a little too determined that we take him more seriously. “Tao,” as its Chinoisie title suggests, is one way for Springfield to pull off the Major Artist bit. He indulges a heavily synthesized sound that lends a disembodied quality to his vocals, and a mix of spiritually charged and portentous songs about “the tao of love” and “the tao of heaven” and “walking on the edge of the long black night.”

When Springfield isn’t laying on the nuclear-winter cliches, he’s pretty much parading his angst and low self-esteem (“I’m crazy about the car I drive/While people struggle just to stay alive”). For my money, Quincy, Michael and Lionel should have invited him to the “We Are the World” session in place of Huey Lewis. But Springfield hangs his overwrought lyrics on strong melodic hooks--a real saving grace, as are the dense, driving, interesting arrangements. In this league, John Waite may exhibit more craft, but Springfield shows more imagination.

Springfield’s main problem is really the narrative failure of many of his songs. He tends to be insufferably rhetorical. But when he manages to tell a story, however narcissistic, he can compel--as on the lovelorn “Written in Rock” or “Stranger in the House.” And an autobiographical ballad about a death in the family--”My Father’s Chair”--is at once deeply felt and touching. Maybe there’s still no mistaking this Springfield for a Springsteen (as Rick once addressed in “She Called Me Bruce”), but I’m ready to accept him as a genuine artist who’s almost found his way.