It Took Christopher Cross Two Years To Write His First No. 1 Hit

In 1980, Christopher Cross released “Ride Like The Wind”, his debut single and first Top 5 hit. On his eponymous freshman album, Cross followed “Ride Like The Wind” with “Sailing”, which became Cross’s first No. 1 single.

The chorus says, “Sailing / Takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be / Just a dream and the wind to carry me / Soon I will be free.” That part of the song, Cross later recalls, came to him quickly.

“I was just at home sitting in this cheap apartment, sitting at the table,” he tells Songfacts. “I remember coming up with the verse and chorus, and the lyrics to the first verse of the chorus all came out. These tunings, like Joni [Mitchell] used to say, they get you in this sort of trance, so all that came out at once. ‘It’s not far down to paradise…’ The chorus just sort of came out.”

“So I got up and wandered around the apartment just thinking, ‘Wow, that’s pretty f—ing great,’” he adds. “I just thought, ‘That’s really cool.’ So then I sat down and had to try to come up with other stuff to make the rest of the song, but I thought I had something there.”

Why It Took Christopher Cross Two Years to Finish “Sailing”

With the beginning of “Sailing” coming quickly for Cross, it may seem like he had an almost instant hit. Unfortunately for Cross, in spite of how quickly the song began, it actually took him a pretty long time to finish the bridge of “Sailing”.

“Then it took about two years before I had a bridge to that song, because the modality of the modal tuning thing, it gets pretty linear, and you’ve got to be careful,” Cross says. “There are writers—I won’t mention who—whose songs can get kind of boring because everything’s this modality. So I knew I needed to lift the song out of that modality in the bridge and make key changes.”

Still, in spite of the lengthy amount of time it took Cross to finish “Sailing”, he knew as soon as it was completed that he had nailed it.

“It took about two years before I came up with the bridge that changes all the keys to where it lifts, but it was a pretty special moment,” he says. “They released the single after ‘Ride Like the Wind’.  When Mo Ostin with Warner Brothers wanted to release it as a single, I thought he was out of his mind because I thought the song was way too introspective to be a hit.”

Not only was “Sailing” a big hit, but it earned Cross three Grammy Awards, including one for Song of the Year.

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