In November 1985, Christopher Cross opened his third album with a song that sounded like a man planting a flag. “Every Turn of the World” is four minutes of forward motion — congas, brass, a rhythm section in a hurry, and a chorus built like a slogan — and it announced, before anything else on the record had a chance to speak, that the king of the gentle ballad had decided to rock. The album that followed it peaked at number 127 in America, produced exactly one charting single, and turned out to be the last Christopher Cross record ever to appear on the Billboard 200. The title track itself, released as a single, did not chart at all.
That is the commercial story, and it is true. But it is not the whole story. Every Turn of the World is also the most revealing album Cross ever made: the record of a superb guitarist tired of being mistaken for a soft-focus balladeer, made with a hit lyricist at the peak of his powers, praised in advance by Billboard — which singled out the title track as the album’s most promising single — and then almost completely ignored. Four decades on, it plays like a dispatch from the exact moment the pop world changed around its author.
The Hardest Act in Pop to Follow
To understand what Cross was pushing against in 1985, remember the scale of what had happened to him five years earlier. His self-titled debut, released at the end of December 1979, produced “Ride Like the Wind” (number two), “Sailing” (number one), “Never Be the Same” and “Say You’ll Be Mine,” and at the 1981 Grammy Awards Cross became the first artist in history to win all four general-field awards in a single ceremony — Record, Song and Album of the Year plus Best New Artist. The feat stood unmatched for 39 years, until Billie Eilish repeated it in 2020. A year later he was back at number one with “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” which also won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
The second album, Another Page (1983), was a respectable seller — Gold in the US, number 11 on the Billboard 200 — with “All Right” reaching number 12 and “Think of Laura” reaching number nine on the Hot 100 and number one on the Adult Contemporary chart. But the ground was shifting. As MTV came to dominate American pop after 1984, Cross’s brand of adult contemporary polish was, as his biographers routinely note, a bad fit for the new visual era, and his commercial momentum faded with remarkable speed. His 1984 Olympic song “A Chance for Heaven” stalled at number 76. The singer who had defined radio in 1980 was, by 1985, in danger of being defined by it forever.
A Guitar Player, Not a Balladeer
The public image never matched the musician. Cross was a guitarist first — good enough that, as a teenager in San Antonio in 1970, he was called in to substitute for Ritchie Blackmore at a Deep Purple concert when Blackmore fell ill. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan, connoisseurs of guitar playing, invited him to play on their albums; Cross declined, admitting he was too intimidated to accept. He was also the original owner of the battered hybrid Stratocaster that became Stevie Ray Vaughan’s famous “Number One”: Cross traded it in at Ray Hennig’s Heart of Texas Music in Austin in 1974, and Vaughan bought it the following day.
So when Cross went into Lion Share Studios in Los Angeles and his own Pop ‘n’ Roll Studios in Santa Monica between April and August 1985, he had something to prove. Producer Michael Omartian — his collaborator since the debut — built the record around a tight core band rather than the celebrity-guest machinery of the early albums: Joe Chemay on bass, John Robinson on drums, Omartian himself on keyboards and horn arrangements, and Cross on vocals, guitars and the SynthAxe, the futuristic guitar synthesizer that let his guitar speak in keyboard voices. The guest list was deliberately modest but telling: Brazilian percussion master Paulinho da Costa, the great Los Angeles horn section of Jerry Hey, Chuck Findley, Gary Grant, Gary Herbig and Kim Hutchcroft, and a backing-vocal team that included a pre-fame Richard Marx and Vesta Williams.
Even the cover made the announcement. Every Christopher Cross album carries a flamingo, a motif inherited from the painting on his debut sleeve; as Rhino later put it, on Every Turn of the World the iconic flamingo was replaced by a racing car. Subtle, it was not.
The Song Itself
“Every Turn of the World” opens the album, and it was written by the album’s three presiding spirits: Cross, Omartian and lyricist John Bettis. It runs 4:02, and it is built to move — da Costa’s congas are credited to this track alone, the horns punch in around the vocal, and the lyric reaches for the largest possible frame. AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann, in his retrospective review, noted that the album’s mostly up-tempo songs carried “save-the-world” lyrical themes, and the title track is the clearest case: a song about motion, urgency and a planet spinning faster than the people on it.
Billboard, reviewing the album on 16 November 1985, heard it the same way. The magazine described a record continuing Cross’s blend of rhythmic pop songs and ballads, credited the co-writing of Bettis and fellow lyricist Will Jennings with adding lyrical depth, was dismissive of the lead single “Charm the Snake” — and picked out the title track as a strong candidate for a follow-up single. The trade paper of record thought “Every Turn of the World” was the hit. It was released as a single in 1985. It did not chart.
John Bettis and the Words
If the album has a secret weapon, it is Bettis, who co-wrote five of its ten tracks, including the title song, “I Hear You Call,” “Love Is Love (In Any Language)” and “That Girl.” Bettis had been writing hits since he formed a band with Richard and Karen Carpenter at Long Beach State in the 1960s, co-writing Carpenters standards such as “Top of the World,” “Yesterday Once More” and “Goodbye to Love.” By 1985 his résumé was becoming absurd: he had supplied the lyric to Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” and in the very year of Every Turn of the World he reached number one again as co-writer of Madonna’s “Crazy for You.” His songs have sold, by his biography’s count, more than 250 million records, and in 2011 he was inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
You can hear what Bettis brought to Cross in the title track’s sweep — the words think in headlines while the music thinks in gears. The album even carries one of the great eccentric credits of the decade, a “Linguistics Advisor,” John Accomando — presumably on hand for an album that included a song called “Love Is Love (In Any Language).”
Charm the Snake, and the Silence After
Warner Bros. led with “Charm the Snake,” released on 14 October 1985, and it became the album’s only charting single, peaking at number 68 on the Hot 100. The title track, “That Girl” and, in 1986, “Love Is Love (In Any Language)” all followed it into silence. The album itself, released on 4 November 1985, peaked at number 127 on the Billboard 200 that December — a startling address for an artist whose first two albums had reached numbers six and eleven. It fared somewhat better abroad, reaching number 27 in Japan, number 34 in the Netherlands, number 37 in Sweden and number 44 in Germany, but there was no disguising the verdict at home.
Ruhlmann’s AllMusic verdict was blunt: the change of direction “didn’t work,” the harder sound cost Cross his core adult contemporary audience, and even the tracks closest to his old style, such as “Love Found a Home,” were overlooked in the wreckage. Cross himself, looking back in an interview with Gary James, was nearly as candid: “I didn’t make the records I should have,” he admitted, “but regardless, things started to falter. Warners lost interest.” He recalled feeling, after Every Turn of the World, that he should leave the label — but Warners would not let him go, and he made one more album under their roof.
Every Turn of the World was his final album for Warner Bros. proper before moving within the family to Reprise, and — a fact that still startles — the final Christopher Cross album ever to chart on the Billboard 200.
Rediscovery, One Turn at a Time
The record’s afterlife has been kinder than its release. In November 2020, marking 35 years since the album appeared, Rhino celebrated it as an album of the day, arguing that Cross “emerges as a terrific guitar player” across its ten originals and that the album was “definitely ripe for rediscovery.” The same year, Cross’s own Complete Works box set gathered all his studio albums in newly remastered form, Every Turn of the World among them; Friday Music later paired it with Back of My Mind in a two-CD remastered reissue aimed squarely at the AOR audience that had grown up to claim both records. In 2025, Omnivore’s All Right: The Worldwide Singles 1980–1988 finally gave the title track’s story a footnote of its own, including “Every Turn of the World” in remix form.
None of this rewrites the chart history, and it shouldn’t. But it does reframe the song. “Every Turn of the World” was not a failure of craft — Billboard heard a hit in it, and the playing and writing are as meticulous as anything Cross ever released. It was a failure of timing and identity: a record by a balladeer determined to prove he could rock, released into a pop landscape that had stopped listening to him in any register. The world turned, exactly as the song said it would. It just turned away — and then, slowly, in the decades since, began turning back.