Since the spectacular success of his first album,
Christopher Cross had suffered a steady commercial decline in its successors, and the slide continued with
Back of My Mind. Having taken a more up-tempo approach on
Every Turn of the World,
Cross returned to pop balladeering here, and though tracks like "I Will (Take You Forever)" certainly matched the work of such gutless peers as
Peter Cetera and
Richard Marx, who were eating up the charts in 1988,
Cross was treated as a has-been, bleating out his songs of generalized romantic and filial devotion over synth-strings and drum programming. ~ William Ruhlmann