Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Marx

There’s a quiet defiance tucked into Marx’s “I understand that,” a phrase that nods to the machinery around pop music without letting it drive the car. He’s acknowledging an objection he’s heard before: label expectations, audience nostalgia, radio formats, the polite industry pressure to keep delivering the version of himself that already sold. Then he pivots fast to authorship. “But this disc” isn’t just a product; it’s a receipt for intention, proof that the creative center of gravity is still his.

The line works because it frames artistic identity as something stable under shifting market weather. Marx isn’t claiming reinvention; he’s claiming alignment. “Always liked and wanted to make” doubles down on continuity, suggesting that even past hits may have been compromises or partial translations of his real taste. The subtext is a familiar veteran-artist story: success can become a cage, and the hardest freedom is returning to the music you loved before anyone told you what you were “supposed” to be.

Context matters here: for a late-80s/90s hitmaker, “this disc” signals the CD-era economics and the long tail of reputation. Fans can turn into gatekeepers; critics can freeze you in a decade. Marx’s sentence is a gentle boundary. He’s not picking a fight with the past. He’s asking permission from no one, while sounding courteous enough that the request feels unreasonable.