Christopher Cross
Window

The image of the two beautiful children of the American singer-songwriter and guitarist (with the boy who looks very much like his father), captured while looking out of an old country window, introduces this valuable album by their parent Christopher Cross, his seventh in career and perhaps the best of the ten published so far; superior, to the writer, even to the famous 1980 debut that managed to accumulate many critical awards and sold many copies at the time.

We are in the nineties, and therefore, in the soft rock field, the “big blankets” of synthesizers and the somewhat overly processed and fake sounds of the eighties, which had also accompanied the initial fortunes of Cross's career, have gone out of fashion. However, the music remains the same, namely classy Californian pop rock, rendered here at its best by recording the acoustic and electric guitars, pianos, organs, and percussion in the most straightforward and present manner possible, leaving everything to its natural resonances.

Cross's feminine, educated, and graceful little voice soars gracefully over these skillful semi-acoustic bases, and the greatest pleasure comes from listening to it as it tackles the romantic ballad of distant love that titles the work: "Every night I open my window and let your love in, thinking that both you and I are looking at the same moon, so that when I find myself awake tossing the pillow in bed, the wind outside brings me your voice…". Certainly, Cross's music is as saccharine and romantic as it can be, but I'm not ashamed to appreciate it: musical works worth engaging with can be as black as pitch, like a "Berlin" by Lou Reed or a "Triage" by David Baerwald, or, on the contrary, white as a lily, and this is the case with Christopher, an illustrious composer and performer of pleasant love songs. There is room for everyone, pessimists and optimists, in music.

With his acoustic guitar as the main instrument and around it the usual group of skilled and measured musicians, the record offers particular quality in reiterating some noble characteristics of Californian pop rock… for example, the ability to mix the acoustic piano with the electric one, in a play of alternation in the spotlight between one and the other in the arrangement full of taste and attention. On the other hand, there is also a string quartet used to personalize and embellish a couple of episodes titled "Thinkin' ‘Bout You" and "Jan's Tune". On "Wishing Well", it is the harmonica that leads the dance, leaning on a delightful semi-acoustic funky groove, driven by a bass of astronomical quality both as execution and recording of the sound, while on "Uncharted Hearts" an electronic trumpet pad lingers in a fusion manner, bringing Cross on the occasion close to certain things by Steely Dan, a feeling also evoked in other episodes by Michael Thompson's aristocratic guitar, called to perform two or three solos here and there.

The surprising cover of "Nature’s Way", the old 1970 hit by Spirit of the late Randy California, is another absolute pinnacle of the album, rendered with the right tension, especially in the perfect abrupt ending, as sudden as well played.

Hats off, as far as I'm concerned, to chubby Cross, his producer and keyboardist Rob Meurer, his backing vocalist Gigi Worth who provides counterpoints in several episodes, and the rest of the context. It is music not for every day… after a couple of his albums, one certainly feels like listening to more visceral and dangerous things, but in his genre, he remains a great.