Singer from the Rave-Ups goes it alone with new album

'I don't have a manager, I don't have a publisher, and I don't have an agent or a record company," Jimmer Podrasky says.

"But I have this record."

He's referring to The Would-Be Plans, the first album in nearly 25 years and a wonderful return to form for the singer and songwriter of the Rave-Ups.

A band that tunefully melded roots and pop, the Rave-Ups brushed up against fame in the '80s after moving from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles - two songs appeared in the 1986 teen-movie hit Pretty in Pink; Podrasky married star Molly Ringwald's sister and was later engaged to actress Shannen Doherty - but they never broke through to the masses. (Hard-luck note: The Pretty in Pink songs did not appear on the movie's multimillion-selling sound track.)

Podrasky, 56, sounds philosophical about it all now.

"I'm sure Epic [the band's record label] wondered, 'What the hell do we do with this stuff?' " he says. "It wasn't rocking enough to be alternative rock and it certainly wasn't country music, either. Had a genre like Americana existed back then, it would have been a little easier for them to go, 'Oh, that's what they are.' "

After the Rave-Ups split, Podrasky focused on raising the son he had with Beth Ringwald, and then went through some harrowingly tough times - "a perfect storm of crap" - after he lost his job as a Hollywood script reader in 2009. At one point he and his son, Chance, were forced to live in the rocker's 20-year-old car.

With the help of musician-actor Robbie Rist and an old friend from the Pittsburgh area, Podrasky was finally able to get back into the studio with producer Mitch Marine, the drummer for Dwight Yoakam. The result is an album that exudes a vibrant spirit of resiliency.

"The smartest thing I did was get out of the way," Podrasky says. "Had I produced it myself, it would have been a much darker and somber and sparse record. But Mitch likes to watch girls dance - it must be a drummer thing. He was interested in making a record that moved."

The still-scuffling Podrasky had hoped to make the album with the Rave-Ups, with whom he occasionally did reunion gigs, but the other members weren't interested in doing new material. He resisted the urging of some friends to use the band's name, which might have helped draw more attention: "It would have been an insult to [the other members] and to fans of the band, too."

He's amazed, though, at how the group's stature has grown since its demise, pointing to a piece that referred to the Rave-Ups as "the seminal Americana band."

"Nobody [cared] about us back then - nobody," he says. "How did we become a seminal band?"