While many of his songs are based on things that happened to him, Marx doesn't like to limit his lyrics to personal experience, which means he can cover a wider variety of topics, Musically, he extends his boundaries but writing without an instrument unless he is working with another writer.
"Right Here Waiting"
Marx wrote "Right Here Waiting" on the road as a love letter to his wife, Cynthia Rhodes. In a 2010 interview, Marx told the Indian newspaper The Indian Express the story behind the song:
"I wrote the song for my wife Cynthia who was in South Africa shooting for a film. We were not married then and I wanted to meet her because I had not seen her for a few months. But my visa application was rejected and when I came back I wrote this song which was more of a letter from me to her. It was the fastest song I wrote, in barely 20 minutes. And this was the time when there was no Skype and Social networking so I had to ship the track to her. The song was very personal and was not intended to go public. But my friends pursued me to record it."
"Through My Veins"
Marx have a Conversation with It's About The Words & Conversations, Richard talks about the pain and struggle he dealt with after the passing of his father,
"My Dad and I had an extraordinarily close relationship. We had music in common, we worked together. He did arrangements for some of my songs on different albums. He died as a result of a car accident in 1997. He was in good health, a young 73, But after his death, the last thing in the world I could face would be hearing them , I knew that it would just tear me to pieces, right? And so I kept avoiding them -- and I kept putting pictures away.And then I read that poem and went, "Wait, wait, wait -- I'm doing this all wrong."I started putting pictures up and talking about him more. And, it worked. I mean, nothing "works" because the loss is the loss but it was remarkable in how it made me feel. That he was still here. I feel like he's around me all the time. And I ended up writing a song about it and The song is called "Through My Veins"
"Hold on To the Night & Now and Forever"
Sometimes I put myself in a scenario that's happened to someone close to me. I've even made a first-person story out of a scenario I've read in a book or seen in a film. And "Hold On To The Nights" – a friend of mine went through exactly that. There were parts of it that I could really relate to, but this guy just thought that he was in the right situation, but he met somebody else, and he was, "Ohhh..." and the girl was involved with somebody already at the time, and they just never got together. They never made a go of it. I've lost touch with this guy over the years, but I remember him thinking, what if I had missed the right one. And all he had left was a brief time where they were hovering around each other and then they both ended up going back to who they were with. I don't know if they ultimately stayed together. Maybe they even got together years later. I don't know, because I lost touch with him. But that came through that, came through this guy that I knew and was going through exactly that.
"Angelia"
The story of "Angelia" came from a composite of different girls that had come and gone back in the past. And the name came from a flight attendant. The extent of my relationship with the actual Angelia is that she served me a ginger ale on the plane. But there was this beautiful girl - the flight attendant. The band and I were on a flight down in Dallas or somewhere in the south going to a gig, and this girl was smiling as she was coming up the aisle with the beverage cart,
"I thought, Oh, she's got to be new, because she was smiling and happy. (laughs) Really pretty girl. And when she got to my aisle, I noticed her name tag was Angelia. Actually, I thought it was ANG-e-lia, and I commented how much I thought her name was beautiful. And she said, "I actually pronounce it Ange-LI-a."
"Hazard"
How did Richard Marx choose Hazard, Nebraska for the setting of this song? When we asked him in our 2012 interview, Marx explained
"That's the funniest part of the whole song. Because the song was all written except for those two syllables. So I had the opening two lines of 'My mother came to duh-duh,' and the rest of the song was finished except for the Nebraska line. And then the Nebraska line actually came because the syllables of it and the sound of it sang so well: 'and leave this old Nebraska town.' They sang so well to me that I was like, Okay, I'm sold on Nebraska. This is way before the Internet, so what I did was I called the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and got some very nice woman on the phone and I said, 'here's my fax number.' I was in Los Angeles, and I said, 'Can you fax me a list of every town and city and municipality in the state of Nebraska.' So all of a sudden just page after page after page is coming through my fax machine. And I took the pages, I think there were 16, 17 pages worth of tons of names on each page. And I threw them up in the air and picked a random sheet and literally put my finger on the page, and it was Hazard."
"Don't Mean Nothing"
Marx explained in 2012 interview:
"I got a lot of people saying, 'Dude, you're 22. How can you be so cynical?' I think cynicism and gratitude can co-exist. And I was very grateful. I moved to L.A. when I was 18, and I definitely spent a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, trying to get something going and nothing was happening. I got rejected by every label multiple times, and I got a lot of doors slammed in my face and more than my share of rejection and all that stuff.But when things did turn around for me, I was still really young. But it didn't mean that I hadn't already been exposed to the jive and the empty promises, and the thing that really makes up the music business in Hollywood and the film business, as well. But my chosen field was music. Guys at record companies telling me, 'You're signed, don't worry about it,' and then they won't call you back, and all kinds of stuff that you count on. Right down to people that sent me notes stamped 'Hobby' on my demo tape. So by the time I wrote "Don't Mean Nothing"
"Satisfied"
What about "Satisfied"? I'm trying to figure out what you did on that song that gave it that pixie dust you talk about. To me, the guitar riff is the part that really drives it. But you made it, as you said, a song called "Satisfied" that somehow is not cliché and is very listenable. Richard:
Right. Well, the riff came first. I'm such a frustrated guitar player, because I'm so not great. But I'm really good at coming up with guitar riffs and solos and parts. I have this array of amazing guitar players and one of the great joys of my career has been working with these amazing guitar players; Mike Landau, Steve Lukather, Michael Thompson, Bruce Geitch, even my buddy Matt Scannell from Vertical Horizon. What's been great is that the collaboration between me and these guitar players is such that instead of them getting annoyed as if I'm line reading them, we always do this thing where we go in and I go, "Okay
"Thanks to You"
Do you did'nt know the meaninng of this song ? really......:v
Thank You.
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