A Conversation with Christopher Cross – HuffPost 9.13.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey Christopher, how are you, man?

Christopher Cross: Good, man, killer.

MR: Looks like you have a new live album, A Night In Paris–two CDs and a DVD–that was recorded in 2012 in HD, nine cameras and all that. Can you go into the experience of having that big of a production involving one of your concerts?

CC: Well, you know, these days, it’s hard to find people who want to put up the money to do this kind of thing because these sorts of projects don’t sell so well typically but they’re really special for the fans. There is this company in France who has been very supportive of touring in Europe with us. They started a record arm of the company and they wanted to launch it with some sort of product they thought had class and validity, so they asked if we’d do this and we said, “Sure!” We did it at this beautiful old venue in Paris. I think it came out very, very well for just being one night. Typically, things like this, you would shoot multiple nights and then cut things together to come up with a combined performance. The band’s real tight and they did a great job of getting everything ready, so we just kind of went for it. It just captures one night of the band on the road in Europe, and it just happens that it’s in Paris in this beautiful theater which is a sexy location.

MR: Chris, the recap is you’ve had many hits, five Grammys, a Golden Globe, and even an Oscar for your studio recordings, and it seems like you’ve been performing live a lot over the last few years.

CC: Well, I’ve continued to make records, I’ve made nine over the years. Most people don’t know about them. I released one recently called Doctor Faith in 2011, but the first two records I made for Warners were the big ones that everyone knows about. I’ve subsequently made records every three years or so and continue to do that, but certainly, playing live has always been a place where you not only make money, but you have a chance to expose your other material to an audience. Commercial radio wouldn’t be playing it, and now with the paradigm shifts in the business, it’s really hard. “Live” is the one place where you can share all the music with an audience that they may not have heard, and that’s really important to an artist, and the reason why I continue to play live is to do that. But again, the change in the industry and the way people are trying to monetize music and the only way to make any real money is playing live.

MR: And it seems like that’s where the trend is. Jazz artists have always had to depend on live performances as a way to survive.

CC: Yeah. People say that the internet democratized music, which it did in that it allows people to make records without getting the hallowed record deal, because you have all these home studios and stuff. The problem is marketing yourself. You can use YouTube and all these things, but it’s so flooded with music that it’s hard to get noticed. I don’t think there’s a model right now that guarantees any long term success where you create an annuity and have a real life with music. So again, the place to get this music exposed or heard is live. When I play live, I certainly play all the hits and all that, but I play a broad ninety minute set, which is a sampling of my discography through all these years, and people hopefully will go with me saying, “Gosh, I love that song from Rendevous or Every Turn Of The World” or one of those obscure albums and they’ll say, “I want to go buy that album.” And it’s very satisfying to do as well. I love playing live. the older I get, the more I interact with great musicians, so it’s satisfying on all kinds of levels. But as a marketing tool, it’s one of the only ones you have left.

MR: Yeah, exactly. Plus you have an international audience, so that helps.

CC: La Cigale was probably twenty-two hundred or something, and it sold out and they were very enthusiastic, so I’m very fortunate in that way. The European and foreign audiences tend to be much more loyal than the US audiences. In other words, they appreciate you for what you’ve done, not what you’ve done lately, whereas the US tends to be very fickle, like a, “What have you done for us lately?” kind of thing. And they go onto the next phase so quickly, too. They’re not quite as studied and devoted as foreign fans are. So with the US, it’s hard. The market has really kind of shifted back to a singles market. When I was a kid, it was forty-fives, singles, that you bought. Albums were kind of a new thing and odd and rare. Now it’s kind of going back to that because people are downloading singles from iTunes and other places and albums aren’t so much the focus anymore. I’ve got a new album I’m working on now and a real good question is how to market it. One of the proposals or ideas that Bob Lefsetz put forward–he’s a big blogger in the industry–was to release two or three songs every couple of months to keep your audience on a steady diet of music as opposed to putting out an entire album that they don’t have time to digest.

MR: I think he’s right on, unfortunately. But you are of a lineage of artists and producers who know how to put together good albums, not just a collection with two or three good songs and filler. It’s like we’ve become a culture that prefers sketches to finished paintings.

CC: Yeah. Somebody asked me the other night, “Why are there only ten songs on a record?” and I said, “Well that comes from the limitation of the amount of audio you can put on a record. Then record company deals were set on paying for ten songs and they’re still that way. With the advent of the CD, people started putting fourteen or sixteen songs on their records because they wanted to have more songs on there. Now with this new record, we’ll probably do something where we release three songs at a time and once the album is fully exposed, we’ll release it as a product. But initially, we’ll probably just release a few songs at a time in the hopes that we can make the longevity of the project longer. Bob used the example of Donald Fagen’s newest album Sunken Condos, which I think is fabulous. It sort of came and went because it was released as an album and people kind of missed it because, again, you have to make the commitment in your life that you’re going to get that record and sit and listen to it and enjoy it like that whereas it’s tough now because you’ve got Facebook and all. My industry was the first industry to really be destroyed, if you will, or eroded by the internet. “Video Killed The Radio Star” and all that stuff is true. It’s certainly now oppressing the movie industry and bookstores. So the model’s completely changed. I don’t know where it’s going to go or if it will ever come back to where music and art in this form is regulated and people can’t get it for free and they have to pay for it. I know, for me, I’m glad I had my fifteen minutes when I did.

MR: [laughs] You have more than fifteen minutes, proven within your project, A Night In Paris, where you sing so many highlights, including one of your biggest hits, “Sailing.” Were you shocked at how big that record was?

CC: Well, yeah, but I wasn’t in favor of it being a single. We released “Ride Like The Wind” and Mo Ostin, who was chairman of Warner Brothers at the time, suggested “Sailing.” I thought he was really off-base, I thought the song was too introspective and personal to be a single. I really fought for something else off of the album, but he’s a great record man, one of the greatest of all time, and he insisted that “Sailing” would be a hit. He stood the course and he was right. Some songwriter and artist friends of mine have given me a great compliment by saying “Sailing” is an interesting song to them because it has artistic merit but was also a commercial success, and other writers I know say that’s hard to do. So that’s been one of the bigger compliments I’ve received. I’m very humbled by it. But yeah, having a song that other writers and people in the industry would consider a well-written song and yet it was a hit on the radio, typically that’s not the case.

MR: When your first album was released, I remember the record was very left field considering what was going on with the pop charts.

CC: I think disco and other forms of music had become the mainstay of radio and I think for my audience, people were tired of that. I don’t think they ever really liked it, but they were tired of it anyway and they were longing for something just reminiscent of what they liked in the sixties and seventies. My record came along and it was kind of a return to that sort of sound. Also, I had some pretty big luminaries on my record, like Michael McDonald and Don Henley. So the radio got attracted to it because they said, “Gee, who are all these big names on this record?” and took a listen and then it seemed to strike a chord. So it did very, very well and gave me a huge start. I wasn’t expecting that either, I was just hoping to have a marginal success with the album, but I sold fifty thousand. Warner Brothers developed me and I would eventually have a hit on the radio, but all that came much earlier. Initially, Warner Brothers signed me because of my voice. It worked out because they weren’t convinced that the songs were that great, they just thought that I had a great voice.

MR: “Ride Like The Wind,” another classic you sing on the new album. When the jazz vocal section starts hitting, there are so many left turns that follow.

CC: Yeah, it wasn’t supposed to be the first single. The first single was supposed to be “Say You’ll Be Mine,” off of the first album. It was a song that I wrote purposefully to start with the chorus because Warner Brothers still didn’t feel I had a single and I could see things slipping away and they wanted to bring in some outside songs. I had heard Boz Scaggs’ song “Camera, Action, Do It Again,” and it started with a chorus, but I wrote “Say You’ll Be Mine,” and eventually, they thought they should release “Ride Like The Wind” because it still had the carry over from the dance era. There have been some cool covers. Freddie Hubbard did one.

MR: On A Night In Paris, you include “Arthur’s Theme” that you co-wrote with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen. What’s the story behind that collaboration?

CC: Well, Orion pictures approached me about doing the score for the film Arthur, which was written by Steven Gordon and going to be directed by him. So I was certainly interested and I’d never done anything like that before. Everything was being thrown at me at that point after the Grammys. So I took it on, I thought it would be fun, but before I got started, Steven Gordon, the director, felt that I was too inexperienced, because I’d never done anything like that and he was a first-time director. There were just too many new ingredients in the soup. They said, respectfully, “Look, we’re going to take this and give it to Burt Bacharach because he’s done more films and Steven feels more comfortable with that.” I wasn’t really disappointed, frankly, because I thought, “Yeah, I’ve never scored a film.” So they gave it to Burt and he was working with Carole Sager at the time. They were a songwriting team, so they called me up and Burt said, “Listen, I’m going to do the score but we’ll still need a title, would you be interested in writing the title of this?” I had a few ideas so I was thrilled of course to get a call from Burt. So I got together with Burt and Carole and we did some long-distance collaborating with Peter [Allen] and came up with this song. Compared to my catalog, it’s very much a Burt Bacharach-sounding thing over what I do. Burt’s strength shows through. But for me, it was just a thrill to get to work with him because, like I said, he’s a huge influence on me and all writers through his whole career. Harmonically, he’s a genius, so it was a lovely experience to kind of do something I’ve never done like that. So we wrote the song and they were very excited about it and said it could be an Oscar-winning song and I was still reeling from the Grammys, so I didn’t even think about it. We had a little cassette when I left Burt’s house. Subsquently, Burt and I wrote another song called “A Chance For Heaven” for the L.A. Olympics album. It was a great experience. He’s a lovely guy as is Carole and Peter, who I miss very much. It was just a wonderful collaboration and not something that I typically do.

MR: Yeah, what is your writing process?

CC: I’m more comfortable alone, I’m much more of a Joni Mitchell-style of writer. She’s my number one hero and my last album Doctor Faith was dedicated to her. I write on guitar. I pretty much start riffs or pieces of songs on guitar. Usually, the melodies come very easily to me and then once I get something kind of formed that have some kind of merit, I’ll start to fill up. Starting back in ’98, I started to collaborate lyrically. There were moments in my writing that I felt were really strong, but there were moments that didn’t seem like complete thoughts, so I started to collaborate with people earlier on, people like Will Jennings, John Bettis and other great lyricists. Eventually, I worked with Rob Meurer, an old, old friend of mine who played in my original band and did some musical theater work. We reconnected in 1988 and started writing together, so we’ve been doing that ever since. Since 1988, I’ve quit working as a solo writer. Rob and I write everything together. I guess it’s music first and lyrics second, but it’s been a great collaboration and we’ve made five or six albums together, and the new one as well. A lot of the songs on the new one are Rob’s, about eight of them, but three or four of them are my own as well. I’m starting to go back to working on my own as well.

MR: One of my favorite collaborations you did with him was a song called “Hunger.” Loved that one.

CC: Thank you very much, that’s one of our favorites, too, and it’s interesting. It’s one of those obscure songs that no one hears, but when we play it live, people hear it, and I always get a great reaction to it. So that’s a perfect example of a song that we feel is every bit as good as anything we’ve ever done and yet it’s almost completely unnoticed as far as the world goes.

MR: For now, maybe.

CC: Maybe somebody will cover it, you never know. But I think it’s funny, you try to grow as an artist and get better at the craft and I think most of the writers I know, Joni and people like that, will say it gets harder and harder so the demands on themselves get harder, but you try to grow and get more sophisticated and have something to say. In “Hunger,” there’s a line that says, “You’re the jones in my vein,” talking about a woman and I had some fans write in during that time who were sorry to hear I was a drug addict.

MR: [laughs] Gotta love people’s reinterpretations. But then again, that’s what an artist often likes to have happen, right, to have the listener apply whatever they want to a song?

CC: I’ve been getting more active on Facebook because on this new record, I don’t have a record deal, and of course, those things are going out of existence. I might do some crowd funding, Kickstarter and stuff to try to recoup some of the money on this record. I posted a picture the other day just for the fans, an old picture of Dudley Moore and I standing together, a really sweet picture, and someone wrote in and said, “Oh, I love Davey Jones!”

MR: [laughs] By the way, before we leave the movie territory I just want to say another one of my favorite songs by you is “Loving Strangers” from Nothing In Common.

CC: I love the fact that I worked on that with Pat Leonard and John Bettis, and I love the fact that it was Jackie Gleason’s last movie and one of Tom Hanks’ first movies. It was a lovely film to be associated with.

MR: And of course, there’s your Oscar that I mentioned earlier. An Oscar, man!

CC: Interestingly, I think I’m one of the only people who’s not a member of the Academy who has won an Oscar. I have an Oscar and I won it for Arthur, but I only have two movie credits, Nothing In Common for “Loving Strangers,” and Arthur. You’re supposed to have three credits. So I need one more credit, and then I need to be sponsored and then I can become a member of the Academy.

MR: You hear that all you music directors reading this right now? Come on already!

CC: [laughs] Well, I’ve looked at some things over the years, but when you’re blessed to have been connected with two beautiful movies like Nothing In Common and Arthur, the bar’s set pretty high, and you want something that’s a quality work to be associated with and unfortunately, I haven’t been approached with anything that I felt was of that standard.

MR: Chris, I have to ask you, what is your advice for new artists?

CC: Oh, you know, I think the same advice for the way I’m living my life right now. You make records and write songs and all this because it’s what we do. This new record I’m doing, I’m self-financing it, actually taking quite a bit of money out of my daily funds to make it, but I’m not skimping on the quality. It’s got real strings and great players. So one could ask, “Why are you doing this?” when Doctor Faith and the last few records haven’t sold really anything to speak of. It’s cause it’s what we do. I think when you look at artists like Tom Waits and Randy Newman and artists of this caliber, sort of the writer’s writers, they were not always heralded and rewarded with huge monetary success. Clearly they’re cult icons and they have a lot of fans, but they just continue doing good music. Same with Joni. Initially, everyone was all abuzz about Clouds and Blue but then her later work was where she really opened as a flower and showed her complete beauty and gift, and yet that music goes overlooked and undiscovered for the most part, like all the stuff she did with Jaco and all that. But she continued to do it. You just do what you do because you love to do it and if you are fortunate to have some success with it, that’s great. But the reason you do this should be because it’s a labor of love and you want to do it. I think you find some way to either make money or make money some other way and just do it. It’s a wonderful way to spend your life. My son is a jazz guitarist and we’re dealing with that right now. Does he want to just go get a job, does he want to go to music school and teach? I keep telling him, “You want to do what you enjoy.” You just don’t want to get up every day and go to a job that you don’t really like. At the end of your life, you’ll look back and it’s kind of a dark road.

MR: That’s beautiful that your kid’s in the family business.

CC: Yeah, my older son’s actually in the restaurant business, he’s thirty-seven, Justin. But my middle son, Rain, is just turning twenty-four and he’s a jazz guitarist. My daughter Madison’s at NYU; she’s studying acting in theatre and film at the school of arts. Justin was older so he was born before the success, but he certainly lived in it. Rain and Madison were in the thick of it so they really had no choice, I suppose. Recently, Rob and I wrote this song with Tina Fey, it’s sort of a long story, but it was for Tina Fey for her 30 Rock character. It’s a song called, “Miss Lemon,” because of her character Liz Lemon. It’s really cool because my daughter is in acting, so my daughter got to meet her, and Tina is such her idol because she’s been breaking a lot of glass ceilings as a female in the industry and is so brilliant and such a role model to my daughter. So those are the times that things cross over that are pretty fun.

MR: By the way, I noticed your musician lineup for A Night In Paris included Richie Garcia, who is a pretty soulful cat.

CC: Yeah, it’s Richie “Gajate” Garcia! That was his father’s name, so he uses it and he always corrects you. “It’s Richie ‘Gajate’ Garcia!” and Roland “Gajate” Garcia, his son, has played with Stevie Wonder now. But you’re right, Richie is one of the most soulful, gentle, kind men I know. He’s such a wonderful person and such a great heart and really inspiring cat in music overall, and of course, an amazing percussionist, drummer and teacher. But more than anything, his family is a beautiful family, and he’s just an inspiring cat to know. I was at a gig once and a percussionist said, “I heard you played with Richie Garcia” and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Yeah, he’s pretty much God.” Richie said he told his wife Mary, “Christopher says I’m God,” and she said, “Can God go take out the trash?” He’s unbelievable. He truly is.

MR: He’s a lovely guy. My story that I’ll throw in, going back to Joni Mitchell, is that I worked with her at Universal for a couple of projects. I did a box set with her on her Geffen material and also on The Beginning Of Survival, a collection of her political and socially conscious works. And I agree with you about the later material. Sure, there’s Court And Spark and Blue and Hejira, I think Night Ride Home is a masterpiece, and I also feel that albums like The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Dog Eat Dog went way out on a limb during the Reagan years when nobody was brave enough to say the things she was saying such as on “Tax Free” and the title track.

CC: Yeah, and Michael MacDonald sang on that record. I think she, and of course being married to Larry [Klein], he pushed her to explore because he was a jazz musician and younger. I haven’t seen her in a while, but there’s a wonderful new interview out with her actually at her home. She’s seventy and she’s incredibly articulate and just wonderful to watch. It’s quite long but I think Joni’s the original. Like I said, my last album was dedicated to her for lifetime inspiration because lyrical, musically, harmonically, she’s the one I’ve kind of followed. Some people say, “Yeah, you followed her all the way, you’re more obscure now as well.” I think it really turned a corner in her music being more sophisticated and more brilliant, and yet people lost interest. Joni got frustrated with that because she didn’t understand how all of these ingenues were out in the world crediting her as being an influence and yet their music was not really of the same ilk…and that’s an understatement. She’s the original and yet people were missing all of this amazing music. It frustrated her to the point where she stopped playing. She doesn’t play anymore, she just paints and lives her life.

MR: Yeah, I miss her making albums and her as well. Well, Chris, we should probably wrap up here, what do you think? I do appreciate your time, sir.

CC: Hey, man, it’s been a pleasure.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne