by Richard Marx
34 “IF YOU EVER LEAVE ME” (BARBRA, PART III)
By any barometer, between 1987 and 1997, I had a good run. Sold a lot of records and had about twenty songs get into the charts, most in the Top Ten. Although I was almost universally hated by music critics, the hits kept coming, but more important, I never made a record or wrote a song I’m embarrassed by. Sure, some of those records have drum sounds that make me cringe now, but there’s nothing I’d be ashamed to play you.
Even at the beginning of my breakthrough as an artist, I knew I wasn’t the kind of personality who would sustain decade after decade of fame. The handful of artists who managed that all had one thing in common: they were focused on their image and paid great attention to maintaining and reinventing it. I, on the other hand, never really had an image to begin with. Except for my fluffy mullet, the only things that were really recognizable about me were my songs. They were always more famous than me, and still are.
My lack of image, or good PR, or whatever you want to call it, is also responsible for the fact that on a regular basis, I see people in my own audience, who have spent their money to see me, break into a look of surprise when I play “Hazard” or “Take This Heart” or “Way She Loves Me.” The look on their face says, “Wait—he did that song?” I felt there was never a competent execution by the publicity people to whom my label and I paid millions over the years to connect the dots. It’s not entirely their fault. I never had much of a “story” that journalists could write about. Happy guy, loves his family, loves writing and recording songs: zzzzzzzz. Where are the hookers and coke-filled nights of debauchery?
I also always hated the PR game and consistently refused to go to Hollywood parties or premieres. Even at music events like the Grammys or the American Music Awards, I was notorious for getting there exactly when I was needed and leaving the minute I was done. One night, I was a presenter at the AMAs, and I told Cynthia as soon as she saw me on the live broadcast, to put cookies in the oven, and I’d be home by the time they cooled. I handed the award to Bobby Brown or Billy Ray Cyrus or whomever, walked off the stage and directly into a limo, and was at my front door within thirty minutes.
It wasn’t that I had immense disdain for that stuff. It was just that I found it, and most of the people involved, extremely boring. I’m generalizing, of course, but most famous people are pretty stupid. Think about it. In order for them to sustain their popularity, they need to focus 99 percent of their energies and attention on themselves. That leaves no time for listening to other people about their lives or reading about the world at large. Hence, they become intellectually stunted. And unless they’re really funny, they make for mind-numbing conversation.
My popularity and power on pop and rock radio was on a rapid decline by the late ’90s. I had always known that time would come, due to my lack of “image,” so I was more prepared for the fall than some artists who really think it will never, ever end. The dilemma was that I still had a ton of music in me, and I felt my best work lie ahead. So, I dove right into a career in the background, just as I had started, and was lucky enough to get consistent work as a writer and producer for other artists.
One of these was my old friend Barbra Streisand.
* * *
Soon after her wedding to James Brolin, Barbra was starting to record a new album of love songs that celebrated her current state of happiness and asked to meet with me about writing a song for her. She was at a recording studio, and I dropped by to try to get an idea of what she wanted. As we talked about various concepts for love songs, I jokingly said, “You should do a song called ‘If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?’ ”
After laughing, she got a serious look and said, “No, wait: you could actually write that and make it not funny, but true. It’s a really sweet sentiment.”
And with that, the song I ultimately wrote and coproduced for her as a duet with Vince Gill, “If You Ever Leave Me,” was born.
As we were talking, an assistant at the studio came in and said he was going to a local market and asked if anyone wanted anything. I had recently discovered Arizona Green Tea and was drinking it constantly. I said, “If they have any, I’ll take a bottle of that, thanks.” Barbra asked what it was and I told her it was my favorite beverage of the moment.
About two weeks later, I went to her home in Malibu to get her key for the song and work out the arrangement. A few minutes after we sat down at the piano, one of her assistants came in and asked if I’d like something to drink. I said, “Oh, maybe just some water, thanks.” And Barbra said, “Wait. No. I knew you were coming, so I had them get that tea you like.”
I stared at her for a moment and thought, How in the world did she remember that? For years, I’ve heard all these stories about what a difficult, bitchy diva Barbra Streisand is, and I don’t see anything but the complete opposite.
Over the last few years, while I’ve done virtually zero work with her (although I did have the honor of being one of her opening guests at London’s Hyde Park concert in 2019), I’ve spent time with Barbra socially and have had some wonderful evenings with her and Jim. My experience with her is that she’s a sweet, thoughtful, insanely bright woman. Her talent is, as everyone knows, otherworldly. What I have experienced with her professionally is that she’s an incredible and total pro who expects everyone involved with the projects she does to be prepared. She also has zero tolerance for bullshit.
The only times I’ve seen her frustrated are when she’s either getting a verbal runaround from someone or dealing with people who are paid to be prepared and professional but are not. I think it’s incredibly hypocritical that historically, when a man exhibits this kind of demand for professionalism, he is considered a perfectionist. When it’s a woman, she’s considered a temperamental bitch.
So I’m going on record here that if you bad rap Barbra Streisand’s character in my presence, those are fighting words.
* * *
While producing the vocal on “If You Ever Leave Me” for her soon thereafter, I did have the experience of seeing her get very frustrated, but only with herself. Before she began singing her vocal on the song we were doing, we sat and talked for a few minutes. She mentioned that a book was about to come out about her, an unauthorized biography, which detailed accounts of her diva behavior and “bitchiness,” but that they were all unfounded stories. She said, “There’s even a story in there that claims once, years ago, I walked into a studio, looked over at the people on the right side of the room, and unceremoniously fired them. Can you imagine?”
A few minutes later, Barbra walked into the vocal booth and we started working on her performance of the song. She sang it over and over, and I would occasionally suggest ideas about phrasing certain words or notes, which is part of the job of a record producer. At one point in the song, she was struggling with a particular line, and I asked her to sing it a different way, and sang it for her over the talk-back.
She said, “Hmmmm. I like the way you do that. Let me try to do it my way.” (She once said to me, “The truth is, I often don’t ‘sing’ these songs. I have to ‘act’ them. If I can’t ‘act’ them with my voice, it doesn’t work.” I thought this was a genius quote.)
She tried singing the line again, but it still didn’t work. So she tried again. And again. At this point she’d been in the vocal booth for over an hour on this song, and I could see by her body language that she was getting frustrated. But I also felt we were dangerously close to having what we needed, so I kept saying, “Really close! One more time!”
After about the fifth time of me saying that, she said, curtly, “You know what? This just isn’t working. I’m not getting it, and I’m feeling like I sound stupid singing this.”
I pressed the talk-back and said, “You could never sound stupid singing anything. But I think you need to take a break.”
And with that, she reached for her headphones and slammed them onto the music stand. She came through the door into the control room with a look of compl
ete disgust and frustration, stopped cold, and stared right at me. The couple of people in the room—her assistant and the engineer—immediately became silent as a church, and after about ten long seconds, I looked at Barbra and said:
“Hey, wait a second—I’m on the left side of the room!”
35 “THIS I PROMISE YOU”
In 2000, I got a call from an executive at Jive Records.
“Hey Richard, how’s it going? I’m calling to see if you might have a song for NSYNC.”
NSYNC was massively popular at this point, having sold about 8 million copies of their first CD in America alone. I was bummed because at first I didn’t think I had anything that was right. Losing an opportunity to work with the biggest group in the country at the moment would have been a major mistake, so I really racked my brain and went through a ton of old material to see if there was anything worth dusting off for them.
I soon remembered that I had recently written a song for a girl group made up of three Latina sisters. I had seen them perform at a wedding reception, and while nobody else in the room paid them any attention, I was blown away by their voices and stage presence. I had a few meetings with them and their father and had hoped I could sign them to a record deal and produce them. But the “business” part of it got way more complicated than it needed to, and I walked away from the idea.
In the midst of our discussions, however, it became clear that material was needed for them to record. So, I put on my songwriter hat and wrote a ballad that utilized three-part vocal harmony, with a mid-tempo groove (for those unfamiliar with music theory, that basically means: not too slow but not too fast), called “This I Promise You.” Due to the complications with the contractual stuff with them, the song never went further than my own archive.
I went to my music room and found the demo. Listening to the song again, I knew it was perfect for NSYNC, and the next morning I sent it to the executive at Jive. He called a few days later and said, “We all love it, and the group loves it, and Justin Timberlake suggested that we get you to produce it. Are you interested?”
As they were the aforementioned biggest band in the country, I jumped at the chance to work with them, and it was one of the most pleasurable experiences I’ve ever had in my career. All five of the guys were gracious, focused, and kind.
But one thing that was immediately obvious was the incredible talent in Justin. It was clear even then that he was going to be a megastar the likes of which we rarely see. He had a fire in his belly that would not be tamed. He was constantly working on song ideas, arrangement ideas, vocal parts. It was really inspiring to even me, who’d been in the business fifteen years at that point and worked with all levels of talented and creative people. Everyone around him knew he was something special.
Making records is a blast for me, but for some it can be tedious work. There would be chunks of time while I was recording with one of the guys in the group and the other four guys would have that time to kill. Video games were already huge, and the lounge in the studio outside the control room had been outfitted with a big-screen TV and a video game console, where the guys would play against each other during their recording breaks. Not Justin, though. Instead of playing, any time he wasn’t needed to record something, he would ask me, “How long ’til you need me again?”
No matter what I told him—“About an hour, just fifteen minutes,” etc.—he would go into a studio next door to work on his own stuff. I had been in the midst of many big-time, high-functioning, and incredibly successful musicians before, and over and over again, I see it’s that commitment and drive that makes someone really talented into a superstar. Justin is no different. Even at his young impressionable age, you could tell he was able to get around the tons of distractions thrown at him and focus on his craft.
And, as it turns out, I became a big footnote to his (and the band’s) success. “This I Promise You” became a Top Five single on the Billboard Hot 100 and not only went to number 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart but remained there for thirteen straight weeks—a massive hit by any standard and one of my best-known compositions to this day. As I look back, even though it was tough to deal with at the time, I’m happy that things fell through with the group of Latina sisters for whom I’d originally written the song. It never would have found its way to NSYNC.
“This I Promise You” not only became a big hit, but it also became and remains an extremely popular wedding song thanks to lyrics like “Just close your eyes, each loving day, and know this feeling won’t go away… until the day my life is through, this I promise you.”
* * *
I know that up until this point, this story has been positive and, frankly, career-changing for me, especially the kismet of how NSYNC ended up recording this song and how I ended up producing it. If we’re being honest, though, there is one thing I have to admit that kind of sucked about the NSYNC experience, and it had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with their insanely crazed fans.
We had to record in a small studio in the middle of nowhere outside of Orlando, where the guys were based. The sessions lasted two days and nights, and by the end of the first night, a bunch of young girls figured out where we were recording and camped out in front of the building, hoping to meet the guys. Seeing this happening, we always planned to sneak the members of the group in and out of the back of the building through a secret door and into a limo. They were whisked away back to their hotels, homes, whatever.
I, on the other hand, would just park in the parking lot and go in and out of the main studio door right past all the craziness. I was in my late thirties, four years past my last radio hit, and was a good twenty years older than most of the young ladies there. I got the feeling I wasn’t on most of their iPods, let alone walls.
A couple of girls came up to me as I came and went and asked, “Is Justin in there?” or “Will you please take this note to Joey?”
The final night we were recording lasted into the wee hours. We finally wrapped around 3:00 a.m. Lance Bass, who did the last of the vocals, was led out the secret door in the back. Feeling good about the work we had just put in, I threw my bag over my shoulder and walked through the front door and headed to my waiting car.
There were still, even at three in the morning, several young ladies sitting on the ground of the parking lot, praying for a glimpse of Justin or Lance or any of them. Being a parent, I wondered who the hell would let their teenage daughters be out here like this but was too tired at that point to judge.
As I opened my car door, a very pretty blonde of about twenty appeared from the group and approached me.
“Excuse me—”
I turned to her.
“Are you”—studying my face closely—“are you Richard Marx?”
I was shocked this young woman knew who I was, and frankly, pretty damned flattered.
With my best “Aww, shucks” demeanor, I said, “Uh, yes, yes, I am.”
Her eyes flew open wide and she said, about fifty decibels louder than before, “Oh… my… GOD! My MOTHER LOVES YOU!”
36 “TO WHERE YOU ARE” (THE MISTAKE THAT WENT TO NUMBER 1)
It’s tough to explain just how hits are made and how some artists get big breaks while other artists just as talented never achieve any commercial notoriety. If you had told me back when I first met him that the skinny, pale, twenty-one-year-old opera singer from Los Angeles named Josh Groban would reach stratospheric heights in the music industry, I would have never believed you.
Shortly after I worked with NSYNC, I received another inquiry from a label. This time it was Warner Bros. They told me about Josh and asked if I had anything that might be right for him.
I had met Josh briefly about a year before this call came in. We were both at a charity event. I was there to sing a couple songs, as was he. Prior to seeing him, I had never heard of him but was soon totally converted. That night, I witnessed firsthand the unique qualities that contributed to Josh’s successful career. Josh came out
and sang this powerful, range-y, opera piece. Hearing this huge, booming Pavarotti-like voice barrel out of the mouth of a scrawny, shy kid seemed so odd to me. It’s no wonder the audience went crazy that night and he went on to sell millions of records. His talent and voice are undeniable, but seeing him perform is so unexpected that I really think that’s what drew people to him in the first place.
Someone at Warners had decided to try to cash in on this kid with the opera voice, and aside from the classical pieces they had recorded on him, much of it in Italian, they wanted to have a couple of original songs that would still fit the vibe of the album. On paper, selling this kind of music at a time when P Diddy ruled the charts was a challenge, to say the least.
I immediately realized that, if nothing else, it would be a fun exercise for me to write a song that was somewhat classical in style. I could incorporate chord changes I had never been able to use in writing pop or rock songs, and those chord progressions, in turn, would open up a new string of possibilities for a melody unlike anything I’d ever written.
I sat down at the piano and composed the music pretty quickly and really loved what I had written. It was reminiscent of various romantic classical pieces, but very much its own animal. The melody was dramatic and ranged from low resonant notes to big, high belting notes. It felt powerful, and “right” for Josh’s voice. I toyed with a lyrical concept or two about young lovers who were being kept apart by circumstance, almost as if from an old Wuthering Heights-esque film, but I was in the midst of writing a lot of songs at that time and a little lyrically burnt out, so I decided to ask a lyricist to step in and write words to my melody.
I called my friend Linda Thompson. Linda, a still-beautiful former Miss Tennessee, had written lyrics to a big hit for Whitney Houston called “I Have Nothing,” Natalie Cole’s “Grown Up Christmas List,” and the Barbra Streisand–Céline Dion song “Tell Him,” among others. We had written a couple of songs together before that I thought were good, but for whatever reason, these had not found homes on anyone’s records. I sent her a track of my song with me singing dummy “la-la” lyrics, and she called me from Los Angeles immediately to tell me she loved it and that she felt the music was telling her to write about her mother, who had passed away recently.