Creativity Quote by Richard Marx

A pop songwriter admitting he never aimed for a “hit” sounds like humility, but it’s also a quiet flex about how hits actually happen. Richard Marx is pushing back on the tidy myth that chart success is engineered by sheer willpower and some studio alchemy. In the late-80s and early-90s machinery he thrived in, the industry loved the idea that a hook could be manufactured on schedule. Marx, by contrast, frames the hit as an after-effect: a song survives the private test first, then gets handed over to a marketplace that’s fickle, mood-driven, and often late to its own desires.

The subtext is craft over prophecy. Writing “for radio” can be a trap: you chase trendlines, sand down personality, and end up with something that sounds like the year it was commissioned. Marx’s line implies he’s writing toward emotional coherence - the internal logic of a lyric, the satisfying turn of a melody - rather than external metrics. That stance also protects the writer. If you believe you can reliably write a hit, you also have to own every miss as personal failure. Saying you never thought “hit” is a way of refusing that roulette-table psychology.

There’s a cultural sting here, too: “hit” is a label applied after the fact, often by people who didn’t write a note. Marx re-centers authorship. The song is the work; the hit is the weather.