Mike HelfrichRichard Marx has been a busy guy while in quarantine: He’s started two video series and a podcast. #SocialDistancing is an interview series, #Beachin‘ features acoustic performances of his hits, and the podcast, Tequila Talk, is Richard and his wife Daisy Fuentes chatting about anything and everything. So why did he start creating all this content? Both to keep himself busy and, he admits, to distract himself from how scared he was.
“As a man who is constantly touring and constantly busy, everything came to a screeching halt very suddenly, and I think that I came up with these projects just in the silence of it all,” Richard tells ABC Audio. “I was filling time…and I was distracting myself from anxiety.”
Richard said during the first few weeks of lockdown, “I was just so worried about my sons and my [84-year-old] mom. And I think that I just was like, ‘What else can I do to not think about how scared I am?'”
So far, Richard’s guests on #SocialDistancing have mostly been his celebrity pals, like Kenny Loggins, Olivia Newton-John and Katie Couric. #Beachin’, meanwhile, mixes fan requests with songs that, he says, “I either haven’t played live in ages or never played live.”
But while Richard says these projects might continue once things return to normal, he can’t really think about that right now.
“One of the things that occurs to me every single day is this bizarre feeling of not knowing when I’m ever going back to performing,” he says. “This could go on for a really long time, so it’s sort of like this period of limbo.”
“Because of that, I’m not thinking in terms of, you know, ‘When this is over, I want to [do this and that],” he adds. “I mean, who knows?”
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