Richard Marx – Right Here Waiting

Barbra Streisand turned it down — she wasn’t going to be right here waiting for anybody.

Richard Marx says he still has the voicemail. He had written a song he considered too personal to record, so he sent the cassette by messenger to Barbra Streisand, who had asked him for a hit. She called back the next day. The song was beautiful, she said, but she’d need the lyrics rewritten, because “I’m not gonna be right here waiting for anyone.” He has since thanked her for the rejection more than once.

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He had written it on the road, and quickly — by his own account the fastest song he ever wrote. His fiancée, the actress Cynthia Rhodes, was in South Africa shooting a film, and he was somewhere in the middle of a fourteen-month American tour behind his debut album. The song is a letter written across that distance. It contains no metaphor worth unpacking and no clever turn, which is close to the whole point of it. It says one thing plainly, at length, to one person.

That plainness is why he assumed it belonged to somebody else. Marx was already an accomplished songwriter-for-hire by then, the son of a Chicago jingle composer, someone who had spent years writing for other artists before anyone let him make his own record. Handing a finished ballad to a bigger name was the ordinary move. Streisand’s refusal put it back on his desk, and it went onto Repeat Offender, the album he built out of material written during that same year and a half of touring.

A tour video with no tour in it

The video, directed by Jim Yukich and produced by Paul Flattery, looks like a document of the 1989 Repeat Offender tour. Black-and-white road footage runs against color scenes of Marx alone at a grand piano in an empty auditorium, working through the song at what appears to be a soundcheck. Almost none of it is what it looks like. The whole thing was shot in Los Angeles, the soundcheck was staged, and the tour material was assembled from other footage because his schedule left barely any window to make a video at all. The result is one of the more effective illusions of the MTV era — a clip that sells intimacy and life-on-the-road exhaustion, built entirely from convenience.

It worked regardless. Right Here Waiting entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No.44 on July 8, 1989, and reached No.1 on August 12, holding the top for three weeks. It was his third consecutive No.1 single and his first of several to top the Adult Contemporary chart, and it went to No.1 on the Radio & Records CHR/Pop Airplay chart that August as well. It topped charts in Canada, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Austria. In Britain it stopped at No.2, blocked by Black Box’s “Ride on Time” — the Italian house record that was, that season, the exact opposite kind of hit.

The RIAA certified it platinum on October 16, 1989, making it his best-selling single. It also completed an unusual run: Marx became the first solo artist whose first seven singles all reached the Billboard Top 5. The album pushed Prince off the top of the Billboard 200 and eventually cleared five million American copies.

What a song like this does afterward

Nothing about the record was fashionable in 1989 and nothing about it has dated in the way fashion does. It has been covered repeatedly, most prominently by Monica with the R&B group 112, produced by David Foster and released as a single in November 1999 — a version Monica had specifically asked Foster to build, having grown up on the original. In 2013 it turned up as the most-streamed love song on Spotify in the United Kingdom in the week before Valentine’s Day, twenty-four years after release. In 2019 Marx marked its thirtieth anniversary at No.1 by simply sitting down and singing it again.

The song survives on the thing that nearly stopped it from existing. Marx thought it was too specific and too personal to hand to an audience, and specificity is precisely what people recognized. Streisand was right that she couldn’t sing it. She was wrong that it needed fixing.