Some songs are hits. Some songs are heirlooms. “I Will (Take You Forever),” released as a single in October 1988, was never the first kind in its own country: it reached only number 41 on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart and never touched the Hot 100 at all. Yet in the decades since, this duet between Christopher Cross and the English stage star Frances Ruffelle has been sung at weddings on the far side of the Pacific, covered by Filipino pop stars, remixed for a definitive collection, and kept in permanent rotation on easy-listening radio in places its makers may never have visited. It is the standout track of Back of My Mind, the last album of Cross’s major-label years — a record America had largely stopped reviewing, let alone buying, by the time it arrived.
The song deserves its strange double life to be told properly, because almost everything about it is a meeting of two worlds: an American soft-rock institution in commercial freefall, and a 23-year-old Tony Award winner fresh from creating one of the most beloved roles in musical-theatre history.
Back to the Ballads: Back of My Mind
Cross’s fourth studio album was a homecoming in every sense. After the deliberate hard-rock swerve of Every Turn of the World (1985) had failed, he returned to what AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann called pop balladeering. The album also marked a quiet corporate changing of the guard: it appeared on 23 August 1988 on Reprise Records rather than Warner Bros. proper, and it was the fourth and final album producer Michael Omartian would make with Cross, closing a partnership that had begun with the five-Grammy debut. Sessions ran from December 1987 to August 1988, split between Cross’s Pop ‘n’ Roll Studios in Santa Monica, rooms in Los Angeles and North Hollywood — and, pointedly, Angel Recording Studios in London, the home city of his duet partner.
Ruhlmann’s retrospective review, carried by AllMusic, is the essential contemporary verdict. He allowed that “I Will (Take You Forever)” certainly matched the work of Peter Cetera and Richard Marx, who were, as he put it, eating up the charts in 1988 — but concluded that Cross himself was by then treated as a has-been, singing songs of romantic and family devotion over synth-strings and drum programming to an audience that had moved on. The numbers agreed. Back of My Mind did not chart at all in the United States. Abroad it reached number 27 in Japan, number 45 in Germany, number 49 in Sweden and number 93 in the Netherlands, and it earned a Gold certification in Spain. Cross, looking back, defended the record — he told interviewer Gary James he felt Back of My Mind was “a real good record,” made after Warner had lost interest in him. He was dropped soon after, and it would be years before he recorded for a major company again.
A Song Built by Old Friends
“I Will (Take You Forever)” closes the first side of the album, running 4:15, and its writing credits read like a reunion. Cross composed it with Omartian and with Rob Meurer — and Meurer was no hired hand. He and Cross had met as teenagers in San Antonio and, with bassist Andy Salmon, formed the band Christopher Cross in Austin, cutting the demo songs that won Cross his Warner contract; a decade later, the two friends would co-produce Cross’s comeback album Rendezvous. The duet is, in other words, the sound of the original inner circle — Cross, Omartian, Meurer — making the kind of polished, devotional ballad they had perfected together, but now for a fraction of the audience.
The production is Omartian’s late-eighties signature: his keyboards, drum programming and string arrangements form the bed, Joe Chemay — the bassist of the classic Cross records — anchors it, and the two voices do the rest. The single shortened the song to a 3:50 edit, backed with “Just One Look,” a solo Cross composition that closes the album; a music video was also filmed, a small monument to how much the label machinery still believed in the record despite everything.
Enter Frances Ruffelle
The duet’s other voice belonged to a singer most American record buyers had never heard of — and most theatregoers of the era revered. Frances Ruffelle was born on 29 August 1965 in Redbridge, London, and trained at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, founded by her mother. She created the role of Dinah in the original West End production of Starlight Express in 1984, then was cast at nineteen as Éponine in the first English-language Les Misérables in London in 1985. When the production crossed to Broadway, she and Colm Wilkinson were invited to recreate their roles, and in 1987 Ruffelle won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. “On My Own,” Éponine’s lament, became her signature song.
She was barely 23 when she stepped into a recording studio with Cross — an ocean and a show-business universe away from the Barbican and Broadway — and the pairing works precisely because of the contrast. She had grown up inside the theatre: her mother, Sylvia Young, founded the famous stage school that still bears her name, and Ruffelle had been appearing on West End stages since childhood, including as Princess Louisa in The Sleeping Prince before the Starlight Express and Les Misérables breakthroughs. Cross, by contrast, was a studio craftsman from Texas whose entire career had been built in recording rooms rather than theatres. On this one record, their two crafts met exactly halfway. Cross’s tenor was the most familiar soft-rock voice of the decade’s opening years: smooth, controlled, unhurried. Ruffelle brought a theatre singer’s directness, a voice trained to carry unrequited longing to the back of a two-thousand-seat house. On a song whose entire substance is a vow — I will, take you, forever — her earnestness keeps his polish honest. Six years later she would represent the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest of 1994, finishing tenth with “Lonely Symphony,” but “I Will” remains her one brush with the American record charts.
The Album Around the Duet
Part of the poignancy of Back of My Mind is how much talent it gathered to so little commercial effect. Michael McDonald, Cross’s most famous vocal foil, sings backing vocals on the opener “Someday.” Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac does the same on “Never Stop Believing.” Gospel great Andraé Crouch joins the backing singers on “I’ll Be Alright”; JayDee Maness adds steel guitar to “Any Old Time”; Tom Scott contributes saxophone and lyricon. And the album contained one genuine near-miss of a different kind: “Swept Away,” Cross’s ballad written with John Bettis and Steve Dorff, had already been heard in episodes of the sitcom Growing Pains in 1987 — Hawaii episodes in which Kirk Cameron’s character falls in love — and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics in 1988. Television still wanted Christopher Cross. Radio, mostly, no longer did.
The Chart Story: Quiet at Home, Heard Abroad
The duet’s American chart peak — number 41 on Adult Contemporary — is a modest line in a discography that once began with five Grammys in one night. But consider what that modest line actually marks: it was the last time a Christopher Cross single appeared on any Billboard chart. Every single he released afterwards, through the 1990s and beyond, failed to register in the United States at all. “I Will (Take You Forever)” is therefore not merely a late entry in his catalogue; it is the final page of his American chart story, the quiet closing entry of a run that had opened, less than a decade earlier, with one of the most explosive debuts in pop history. That a gentle duet with a British stage actress should carry that distinction feels oddly appropriate — Cross’s chart career ended not with a collapse but with a whisper, in the adult contemporary format that had always been his natural home, singing a promise of permanence as the spotlight finally moved on. But the single travelled. It reached number 47 in Australia and number 90 in Canada, and the album’s documentation notes that the song charted in several other countries even as everything around it failed at home. There is a fitting coincidence in the timing, too: 1988 was the year Cross himself married his second wife, Jan. The man singing the decade’s most committed wedding vow was, that same year, making one of his own.
The real afterlife, though, happened further east. In the Philippines, “I Will (Take You Forever)” settled into the permanent repertoire of easy-listening radio, where it remains a playlist staple decades later. In 2009, Filipino singer Kris Lawrence recorded it as a duet with Denise Laurel for his album Moments of Love, released by Universal Music Philippines — the Cross–Omartian–Meurer composition reborn as a vehicle for two Philippine stars. The song was also among those preserved when Cross’s catalogue was curated for The Definitive Christopher Cross in 2001, which carried it in a new mix, and his Warner-era singles were gathered again in 2025 on Omnivore’s All Right: The Worldwide Singles 1980–1988.
Why “I Will (Take You Forever)” Endures
Strip away the chart positions and what remains is a beautifully made record about permanence, released by two singers whose industries were built on impermanence. Cross never again troubled the American top forty; Ruffelle returned to the stage, where she belonged. But a vow is a vow. In Manila wedding halls and on soft-rock playlists the song still does the work it was written to do — which may be the most Christopher Cross ending imaginable. His biggest songs were about motion: riding like the wind, sailing. His most durable late song is about staying. It took the long way around the world to prove it, but forever, it turns out, was accurate.