Christopher Cross - Christopher Cross

A friend of my parents’ had downsized and moved to Florida, but she still had a storage locker with a house’s worth of odds and ends. They offered me the pick of the place before they gave the rest to the Market Street Mission, so I was able to get a nice glass table, some chairs, a couple mugs and glasses, and a lamp. As an afterthought, I asked if they had some CDs. It turns out that there was a microwave box that was filled with celtic chant, christmas music, and old lady classics like Christopher Cross by Christopher Cross. I will be reviewing these over the next month or two, so get ready for a whole lot of best-of compilations.

We’ve got nine songs, 39 minutes, and a lot of guest musicians. This is very much a soft rock album and a product of the LA studio scene. A lot of Doobie Brothers/former Steely Dan touring members show up in the credits here, but Cross himself is the only (credited) songwriter. I suspect that keyboardist Rob Meurer and producers Michael Omartian and Michael Ostin did the bulk of the arranging. This is also one of the first major albums to be recorded digitally. Those two things mean that Christopher Cross is a very smooth listening experience.

There’s some full fat schmaltz here, like the melodramatic “Never Be the Same”, the airheaded “Say You’ll Be Mine”, and the polarizing “Sailing”. If you stare too deeply into these lyrics expecting wit or insight, you will be disappointed. Still, the songs as a whole are very well orchestrated, well executed numbers that do creep up on you. For example, we start off the record with sunny cha-cha “Say You’ll Be Mine”, then slip into the jazzy dorian verses and half-time major choruses of “I Really Don’t Know Anymore”. “The Light Is On” is a bongo-and-synth-driven minor key deep cut that I also really enjoy. I strongly associate the tone and instrumentation of those last three songs with the smooth jazz and soft rock influenced soundtracks of Nintendo games in the early 00s, which probably says more about me than it does about this record.

The mix is botox-taut, from the guitars to the brass to the strings. Warner Brothers spared no expense getting this thing Grammy-sweeping clean. Cross and his background vocalists (including Donald Fagen on "The Light Is On" and Michael McDonald on "I Really Don't Know Anymore" and “Ride Like The Wind”) sing high but still sound quite warm. My sister who studied musical theater and vocal performance would describe them as having “strong ping, low twang".

I did not come into this album expecting guitar solos, but they’re here on almost every track. There’s some really cool guitar harmonies on “Say You’ll Be Mine”. A baby-faced Eric Johnson practically steals “Minstrel Gigolo” out from under Cross. Cross himself plays most of the rhythm guitar on the record, but he also steps out in front for the Beatlesque “Poor Shirley”. His efforts are unflashy and melodic, but they do sound more “written” than the improvised session musician cuts elsewhere on Christopher Cross for better or for worse. He also cuts a great solo on “Ride Like The Wind” but you would be forgiven for not hearing it given how bafflingly low it is in the mix beneath the horn and vocal vamp.

I was loosely aware of Cross before I listened to this record, in the sense that I knew that “Sailing” was the namesake of the retroactive genre of yacht rock. “Sailing” is the standout single from this project for good reason, but it’s not representative of the rest of the record. It’s more of a soft R&B song than the jazzy and rocking numbers elsewhere. It’s low in Cross’s vocal register compared to the soaring leads of “I Really Don’t Know Anymore”. Despite being faster than “Spinning” and “Poor Shirley” it’s the least intense song on the record thanks to a very restrained rhythm section, even during the choruses. There are dynamics from verse to chorus to bridge, but it largely finds its breeze and sails along. It sneaks up on you, and once it has you, it doesn’t want to let go. I hate to admit that it is a beautiful song.

Let’s pause discussion of the album-as-art right here for a little bit and talk about the album-as-object. Christopher Cross, real name Christopher Geppert, is absent from this CD in pictoral form. The cover is an airbrushed flamingo roundel, like the 1st wing of the People’s Air Force of Margaritaville, sitting in a doppled green field. I like the funky font choice. The disc, like almost every CD until 1990, is pretty plain and has a lot of text on it. The internal booklet is also standardized and text-heavy. Overall, the packaging is kind of blah, but it’s the kind of inoffensive blah that pairs well with similarly inoffensive music.

The blurb on the back is what I really want to draw attention to, because it includes the only presence from the man himself on the packaging. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Cross says “Before I came along, there had been disco, then a lot of chain-saw radio and punk. People of the age group that buys my records were a little tired of that… saying ‘I’d sure like to hear a song now and then’… I’m a very nonpolitical and nonintellectual lyricist. But people have so many demands on them already in their lives, I’m just trying to give them a little enjoyment and relaxation.” With that, he almost damns his record.

What is “Sailing” about? What is the rest of this record about? If you took the back cover of the album at its word, it’s about as deep as an oil slick. Unlike the Steely Dan records that Omartian cribbed all the sidemen from, Christopher Cross has no barely-hidden darkness to the lyrics, no metaphor, no sense of irony. Even on “Minstrel Gigolo”, the song with the most risque title, it just sounds like Cross wrote a poem about how he gets all the chicks for being good at music and then changed all the “I”s into “you”s. You could say that “Sailing” is literally about sailing on a boat, or you could more charitably say it’s about Cross’s happy place. You could also say that “Sailing” is about selling records. You could say that about every song on this album.

However, I can’t let an out-of-context newspaper clipping be the only thing I take away from this record. The album sounds amazing. I have caught myself hearing the ghostly, rum-tinged echoes of many of the songs on it as I’ve gone about my day over the past week. And Christopher Cross is not a simple or shallow record, even if its lyrics can often be simple and shallow. It has incredible performers on it. It’s well-arranged. Cross is a skilled vocalist and guitarist. The harmonic choices and chord changes are more complex than meet the eye, but are voice-led and arranged in such a way that they never feel jarring. This album does feel deeper than the lyrics would imply, and that depth due to the confluence of Cross’s melancholic delivery and the session musicians’ indefatigablity.

I like punk, disco, hard rock, all of the things to which this album is a counter-revolutionary reaction by Warner Brothers’ Los Angeles division. But I think there’s a place for conscious music as well as non-conscious music. At the end of the day, I really do just want a record that makes me feel something, even if that feeling is something as corny as this. Comfortable. Calm.

Christopher Cross by Christopher Cross is a good album, and I like it.