The long wait is over: Richard Marx is returning to Fort Wayne and The Clyde Theatre on Sunday, Feb. 18. 

He was last here in February 2020, just before the world locked down. He was touring on a new album, Limitless, which hit the top of the streaming pop charts. Since then, he’s become a best-selling author with his memoir, Stories To Tell, and a stellar album of songs aptly called Songwriter. 

In October he delighted longtime fans with a single, “Days To Remember,” written, recorded, and performed in collaboration with his three sons, Jesse, Lucas, and Brandon.

It’s hard to believe, but the eternally youthful Marx is into his fifth decade as a performing artist and songwriter. 

Thirty million albums as a solo artist in the iconic MTV era only tell part of the story; nobody can forget those great ballads: “Right Here Waiting,” “Angelia,” and “Hold On to the Nights.” But following a 10-year run as a multi-platinum pop star with a worldwide following, he kept writing songs, solo and in collaboration with A-list artists, and he’s never stopped. 

Right place, right Time

Raised in a family of professional musicians, Marx gave great credit to his pianist and composer/arranger father, who produced jingles for television. 

In took some initiative to get his break when he mailed a cassette of singing and songwriting demos, unsolicited, to R&B superstar Lionel Richie. Fortunately, Richie listened it and phoned Marx, saying he ought to come to L.A. for recording studio work. Marx followed that advice, leaving his Chicago home after high school

When he was only 19, through the mentorship of Richie, Marx began singing backup on major label sessions for other artists, all the while pitching his songs. He provided a couple of huge hits on the country charts for Kenny Rogers. A couple of years later he parlayed his skills into a recording contract, climbing the pop charts with the breezy pop-rocker “Don’t Mean Nothing.”

Going beyond ballads

Marx has a cutting, soaring high tenor register and is more than capable on piano and guitar. 

Fans like me want to remind you that even though he’s thought of as a ballad singer, Marx released an eyebrow-raising, fist-pumping run of hard rock anthems produced and performed with the likes of Fee Waybill of The Tubes and Steve Lukather of Toto. 

I urge you to check out Marx’s third album, Rush Street, from 1991. Besides the arena rockers, the sleeper hit from that album was “Hazard,” a downright spooky murder mystery ballad which is a fan favorite that he still performs today.

As a songwriter, he scored hits with Madonna, NSYNC, metal band Vixen, Vince Gill, Josh Groban, Sarah Brightman, Luther Vandross, Kenny Loggins, Barbra Streisand, Natalie Cole, Toni Braxton, and the list goes on. In the last decade he’s written for Lifehouse and Chris Daughtry  and had a couple of hit records for Keith Urban, with whom he continues to collaborate.

Fire still burns

All this is the run-up to his thoroughly enjoyable 2022 album Songwriter: 20 new songs which he self-produced and recorded with collaborations and an impressive roster of co-writers. 

Marx has nothing to prove and nobody to please, and he doesn’t have to fit into anybody’s pre-conceived ideas about genre or format. 

Songwriter is an album of everything Marx excels at: pop, hard rock, country, and ballads alongside each other. It’s clear the formula for his continued success is he writes songs that make sense to him; he’s long past the time when a record label made him conform to an image. 

Some songs on Songwriter were written by Marx solo, but he presents many more co-written with a long list of colleagues including Urban, Darius Rucker, David Hodges of Evanescence, Matt Scannell of Vertical Horizon, Daughtry, Jason Wade of Lifehouse, Richard Page of Mr. Mister, Nashville songwriting legend Gary Burr, and Burt Bacharach, who passed away just a year ago at 94. 

All of the tracks sound fresh, contemporary in their arrangements, and polished; you could take them as a Richard Marx solo album or as a catalog of demos to pitch to the big stars in the music business machine that Marx has been handling deftly more than 40 years.

None of my descriptions are needed by the Fort Wayne fans who are going to come out to The Clyde in force to see their favorite ageless heartthrob sing those beloved ballads.

Rest assured that Marx knows well that the fans want to hear his greatest hits as a solo artist from back in the day, and to listen to him tell the many stories he recounts from his memoir. 

It might still be winter, but Marx is coming back around to recall those “Endless Summer Nights.”