Richard Marx Reveals His Secret Weapon for Touring

For a period of time in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Richard Marx was everywhere. His self-titled album spawned four top five hits, including “Don’t Mean Nothing” and Hold On to the Nights,” which hit No. 1 in 1988. Repeat Offender went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 1989. His next two albums, Rush Street in 1991 and Paid Vacation in 1994, performed well, too, and the single “Now and Forever” went to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1994. The Chicago native kept a busy touring schedule quickly graduated from theaters to amphitheaters and arenas.

Soon enough, Marx was out of sight. Being away from home had become a grind, and Marx wanted to raise his kids and get off the road. “I hated touring at that point,” Marx tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “I had done it so much, and didn’t have an appreciation for it anymore.”

By the late ’90s, Marx wasn’t playing live much. 

Today, though, Marx is thriving on the road thanks to wife Daisy Fuentes, whom he married in 2015. Fuentes, well known in music circles as a former MTV VJ, “loves the road,” says Marx, “and she’s good at being on the road.” Fuentes provides him a companion to spend time with rather than having “a dopamine hit” on stage followed by “silence” in a hotel room by himself. 

“I’m greeted by this at the side of the stage by Daisy Fuentes holding a martini, saying, ‘Great show. I’ve got a table at this great restaurant down the street, and tomorrow we’re going to do a hike and blah, blah.’ And all of a sudden, touring is a blast!” he says. Marx will perform at Summerfest in Milwaukee on July 4 and has a short string of dates with Rick Springfield in Florida and Tennessee in October.

It’s quite a change from his opinion of touring in the mid-90s. After nearly a decade of massive success, “ticket sales dropped, album sales dropped,” Marx recalls, and he decided to reinvent himself for a second career as a songwriter-producer. He moved back to Chicago and opened Renegade Recording Studios in 1999. Not only was a welcome change for the father of three boys, it didn’t take long for Marx to have success. 

“I set my attention to that and boom, *NSYNC happened,” says Marx from his Los Angeles home. “Boom, Josh Groban happened. Boom, Keith Urban happened. It started to be this avalanche of work, writing more music and producing more music than I had done in my artist career, and having tremendous success. But instead of getting up at 4 a.m. to go do Good Morning America, I was up when it aired, having my coffee, watching other people hard work. And it was a really great period of time that I wouldn’t trade, and it afforded me the the opportunity to literally be up in the morning, every morning, and take my kids to school and be present and not on the road all the time once they got into their teen years.”

Music is truly a family affair for Marx. His latest single, “Forget About the World,” was co-written with Marx and his three sons: Brandon, Jesse and Lucas, who also produced the track. The instantly hummable tune with some dark lyrics (“Rome is burning and it’s raining red, feels like everything is hanging by a thread”) is “a statement of rescue, of hope at the end of the day,” he explains. 

“Forget About the World” was the second collaboration between Marx and his sons after “When You Love Me” — and it probably won’t be the last. “I just said to them, ‘Can we please make this an annual event where the four of us get in a room? I want to do this till I die.’”

Listen to the entire interview with Richard Marx, which covers the importance of solo acoustic shows, his podcast Stories to Tell With Richard Marx, the challenge of predicting which song will be a hit and much more. Listen using the embedded Spotify player below or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Podbean or Everand.