The once-arousing Rick Springfield, an important cultural figure of 1980s, is attempting a comeback with this week’s release of My Precious Little One, an album of lullabyes he wrote for his own sons. If someone like, say, Gavin Rossdale did this, it would be touching. Rick’s two sons, however, are 20 and 23 years old, while Rick is almost 60. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the younger Springfields are too busy downing premium vodka and exploiting their famous name to need much active cuddling and soothing, let alone a quavery rendition of songs like “The Night is a Friendly Color.”

Rick claims he wrote the songs back when they were actual infants, not long after his peak of fame in 1981 when he effortlessly doubled as a respected Grammy-Award-Winning artist (“Jessie’s Girl”) and a cheesy TV doctor on “General Hospital.” As Wikipedia reminds us, “Soon after [Rick’s character] Dr. Noah Drake arrives at General Hospital in 1981, he gains a reputation of being a playboy. He becomes involved with nurse Bobbie Spencer. but she realizes that he is unable to commit to her. She fakes blindness in order to keep him by her side.” The resourceful Nurse Bobby Spencer sounds like a real keeper.

Even if the lullabyes are vintage-80s, isn’t releasing them now just an attempt to cash in on the current kid-tunes boom? One final question: Is the Night really a Friendly Color? I just looked out the front window of Perfect Baby Handbook Worldwide Headquarters on Montague Street and the color of the night is, at best, tolerant and, at worst, forbidding, even if its blackness is softened slightly by the red neon sign of Montague St. Hand-Rolled Bagels.