Richard Marx dishes on the Australian superstar who loves and hates his songs

Richard Marx shares his heartbreak after losing good friend Olivia Newton-John and what it was like working with Keith Urban.

Richard Marx was steeling himself for another tug of war with his songwriting mate Keith Urban after they wrote One Day Longer together.

The American hitmaker – who has penned as many hits for everyone from NSYNC to Barbra Streisand as he has for himself – has become accustomed to Urban loving a song while they are writing it, losing the vibe a few days later, and then reclaiming it for his own record.

They went through this creative rollercoaster for Urban’s 2005 No. 1 country hit Better Life, which Marx feared wouldn’t make the Be Here album because Urban kept changing his mind about the track.

The same process occurred with the 2007 single Everybody to the point where Marx “cut it” himself. When Urban heard his version, he sent him a message saying “Dude, I blew it, can I have that song back?”

Marx stretches his songwriter muscles on rock, pop and country for new record. Picture: Cole Miller / Supplied.

One Day Longer is their latest collaboration and features on Marx’s new record Songwriter, a genre-spanning collection of pop, rock, country and ballads.

“This song, like several songs I’ve written with Keith over the years, was something that he was madly in love with while we were writing it and completely off it three days later,” a chuckling Marx says.

“I remember we started writing One Day Longer at about 10am and we were right into it and we were putting the track together at about 1pm and Keith says ‘Richard, I love this song and I’m hungry right now and I hate everything when I’m hungry. So that should tell you how much I love this song.’

“And I got really fired up … and he still didn’t cut it! I reminded him of that recently and he was like “Yeah, that’s me. But man, it came out so great!’”

#FBF With @KeithUrban at the Aria Awards in #Sydney in December 2018. #throwbackpic.twitter.com/jXSbSBBS4z

— Richard Marx (@richardmarx) March 6, 2020

The 59-year-old superstar has possessed the gift of writing songs that millions of people love since his teens, encouraged by Lionel Richie, who had been given his demo tape, to move to Los Angeles after graduating high school.

The Marx songwriting gene is strong, with the Right Here Waiting star enlisting his sons Lucas and Jesse, who are both working producers and artists, to write a couple of tracks each for the new record.

“I did have to have Lucas sort of fit me into his schedule and I gave him some crap about that at one point. ‘Like really? Next Thursday? That’s as soon as you can make time for your father.’”

Jesse co-wrote Shame On You, the recent single from the album’s rock section. That song invokes a heart full of pride as a father, and a stab of grief as it features one of the last studio performances of his friend, Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died in March a couple of months after it was recorded.

Marx became good mates with Dave Grohl in 2014 at a Hollywood dinner party. The Foo Fighters frontman would randomly invite him to the band’s studio to hear new music or just hang out. Marx recalls one memorable evening when the rock gods were rehearsing covers for an upcoming tour and asked him to sing on Manfred Mann’s Blinded by The Light and Billy Joel’s You May Be Right because Grohl’s voice was worn out.

Marx and wife Daisy Fuentes arrive at the 2018 ARIA Awards in Sydney. Picture: AAP.

Marx and his wife, television personality wife Daisy Fuentes, often bumped into Hawkins and his wife Alison when out at the same Malibu restaurants and also kept in regular contact.

“I just immediately fell in love with Taylor the minute I met him. And he was like, ‘We need to do something together, man’,” he says.

Shame On You was just about to be mixed when Marx suggested to his son: “What if we could get the greatest rock drummer on earth to play drums on this?”

Hawkins said yes halfway through listening to the track and father and son spent an afternoon at the drummer’s home studio watching him sparkle his magic on their song.

“It’s an incredible performance and there’s something incredibly bittersweet, obviously, about it,” he says.

The single he wrote with Lucas, Same Heartbreak, Different Day, also strikes a bittersweet note; it was released just a few weeks before his lifelong friend Olivia Newton-John died.

Marx met the Australian legend not long after he moved to Los Angeles and they often performed together over the years, releasing the duet Never Far Away in 2002.

My heart is broken. Rest now, sweet friend. You were as kind and loving a person as there’s ever been. I’ll miss you every day. 💔 pic.twitter.com/Z1zkVe9CVb

— Richard Marx (@richardmarx) August 8, 2022

“For my 20th birthday, she took me to this beautiful restaurant, which you couldn’t get into but she was Olivia Newton-John. We were friends for most of my life and I had a tremendous respect for her creatively, musically, she’s one of the most remarkable people I ever knew,” he says.

“We wrote a song together back in those early days … it was almost finished and we kept threatening to get back together to write again.”

He plans to raise a glass in her honour with their mutual friend Richard Wilkins when he returns to Australia for the Songwriter tour next year which kicks off at QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane on February 24 and finishes at the Astor Theatre, Perth on March 10.

“I would probably be the tricky Dick now. I was never a partyer at all, I rarely drank but about 10 years ago, I decided I liked a martini and later Daisy introduced me to top shelf sipping tequila … so I think now at this stage in the game, I might be the troublemaker between the two of us Dicks.”

Songwriter by Richard Marx is out on September 30. Tickets for his tour go on sale on October 6 with all dates via frontiertouring.com

Originally published as Richard Marx dishes on the Australian superstar who loves and hates his songs