Richard Marx – Hold On To The Nights

The drums don’t arrive until four minutes into a five-minute song, and that patience gave Richard Marx the No.1 every label had told him he’d never have.

For most of its length, “Hold On to the Nights” barely moves. Richard Marx croons over soft synth chimes and distant echoes, the arrangement holding its breath, and the drums don’t crash in until nearly four minutes into a five-minute record. It’s a song built almost entirely on restraint — and that patience is exactly what made it land. When the release finally comes, it lands because the song made you wait for it.

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Marx wrote the ballad with his friend Ross Vannelli — a detail Marx himself has confirmed, even though the credits usually list him alone — drawing on a real story a friend had told him: two people who met and felt they might be meant for each other, except both were already committed elsewhere, and so they parted without ever finding out. That ache of the road not taken runs through the whole lyric. He recorded it for his self-titled debut with co-producer David Cole, and by the time it reached radio as the album’s fourth single on May 3, 1988, Marx had already scored three straight top-three hits from the same record.

That run was itself remarkable. Every major label had passed on Marx as an artist; even seasoned songwriting partners had told him to give up the idea of performing his own material and stick to writing for others. He’d spent years as a session singer and a writer-for-hire, landing a No. 1 as a songwriter in 1984 with Kenny Rogers’ “What About Me?” before he ever got his own deal. When Manhattan Records finally released his debut in 1987, it went triple platinum and produced four top-three singles — and “Hold On to the Nights” was the one that finally took him all the way up.

The night he beat the hair metal

On July 23, 1988, the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — Marx’s first chart-topper as a performer — holding off Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” which stalled at No. 2 that week. It spent 21 weeks on the chart and reached No. 3 on the Adult Contemporary tally. With it, Marx became the first male solo artist, and only the second solo act after Whitney Houston, to send four singles from a debut album into the top three. He wasn’t finished: his first seven singles all reached the top five, a record no male soloist had ever set. For a performer everyone in the business had written off, the softest, slowest song on his first record turned out to be the one that proved them all wrong.