Richard Marx is on tour in support of his latest album, Songwriter, featuring 20 tracks in four genres: rock, pop, ballads and country. The chart-topping artist is surprised at just how well some of his new songs — specifically the single “Same Heartbreak Different Day” — have been going over with his fans.

“What I’ve noticed is the response to that song is so extended and powerful, where the audience is cheering as if I just did ‘Endless Summer Nights’ or ‘Right Here Waiting,'” Richard tells ABC Audio. “And I finally started to comment on it to them. [I said], ‘For me to play a song that I know you don’t know, and for you to cheer it like that … that’s exactly why I keep writing songs.'”

“That’s like the greatest reward for a songwriter: to play somebody a new song and have them freak out over it,” he adds. 

Richard says there’s another aspect of Songwriter that fans are really enjoying. 

“A lot of people [are] really happy that I did five rock songs because I hadn’t done sort of guitar-heavy rock in quite a while. And that’s really where I started,” he notes. 

One of those rock songs, “One More Yesterday,” was written a while ago with Chris Daughtry and Lifehouse‘s Jason Wade, but it was never recorded.

Meanwhile, Richard, an active Twitter user, has been retweeting negative content about Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, recently. But is he planning to quit the platform, as others have done? He says no, although he thinks Musk is “really dangerous,” “an emotionally unstable, inherently bad guy” and an “evil genius.”

“I think to myself, ‘How could Twitter become more of a cesspool?'” he notes. “Well, maybe the answer is Elon Musk.”

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