Hazard

Richard Marx is known for songs about relationships, but he will write a story song every now and then. This purely fictional song is set in the small town of Hazard, Nebraska, which is a real place. It tells the story of a man who grows up there and is accused of murder when his girlfriend is found dead by the river. Marx plays the boyfriend/possible killer in the video, which looks like it could be a segment of a TV crime drama. The song and the video were completely different from what we had come to expect from Marx, but it worked; the song became his eighth Top 10 hit in the US.

How did Richard Marx choose Hazard, Nebraska for the setting of this song? When we asked him in a 2012 Songfacts interview, he explained: "That's the funniest part of the whole song. Because the song was all written except for those two syllables. So I had the opening two lines of 'My mother came to duh-duh,' and the rest of the song was finished except for the Nebraska line. And then the Nebraska line actually came because the syllables of it and the sound of it sang so well: 'and leave this old Nebraska town.' They sang so well to me that I was like, Okay, I'm sold on Nebraska. This is way before the Internet, so what I did was I called the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and got some very nice woman on the phone and I said, 'here's my fax number.' I was in Los Angeles, and I said, 'Can you fax me a list of every town and city and municipality in the state of Nebraska.' So all of a sudden just page after page after page is coming through my fax machine. And I took the pages, I think there were 16, 17 pages worth of tons of names on each page. And I threw them up in the air and picked a random sheet and literally put my finger on the page, and it was Hazard."

In 1992, Marx played a concert in North Platte, Nebraska. The next morning, he and his entourage stopped by Hazard, which had 78 residents at the time. Marx had his picture taken at the post office and by a road sign, and picked up some "Hazard Daze" T-shirts. Only a few of the residents knew he was there, and Marx left after about 30 minutes.