On Saturday night, if you get caught between the Mesa and Montecito, the best that you can do is to find your way to the Christopher Cross concert at the Granada Theatre, which starts at 8 p.m.

Tickets are available by clicking here.

You probably know Cross from his Grammy-winning song “Sailing,” the Oscar-winning song “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” co-written with Burt Bacharach and others, and his hit “Ride Like the Wind,” all of which came within a short span at the beginning of the 1980s. While he wasn’t able to maintain that incredible initial string of success, he has continued to release new music since that time, most recently his well-received new album Secret Ladder.

Cross talked to Noozhawk about his upcoming concert. Click here for the full interview.

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Jeff Moehlis: What can we look forward to at the upcoming concert?

Christopher Cross: The reason I’m touring and continue to tour is that I’m making new music. A lot of people are just familiar with the old stuff, but I’ve made about 10, 12, 14 albums so far. The new one, Secret Ladder, came out Sept. 12. It’s really why I keep touring, to expose the new music.

It’s a singer-songwriter show, very much like a Jackson Browne or a James Taylor show. It’s a great group of musicians, mostly jazz-trained musicians — piano, bass, drums, keys, sax, two female singers. We do a broad selection of stuff from my albums — the hits that people know and want to hear, but we also do a sampling of songs from all these albums that I’ve had out, with a little bit of a focus on the new record, three or four songs from that. I’ve had a hundred and something songs, so it’s just a sampling of all those. There’s an acoustic section of the show — we break out front and do an acoustic thing. So it’s a straight-ahead show. If people like my voice and like to hear me sing my songs, I think it’s very satisfying.

It’s good also, if you haven’t heard this other material — there are certainly some die-hard fans that are there — but if you come just because you’ve got some romantic connection to “Arthur” or whatever, you’ll get to hear all this other music, which is really the point.

I’m not out there selling “Arthur,” which is selling just fine.

JM: I understand that you used to live in Santa Barbara. Can you tell me what you remember most fondly about living here?

CC: I have a number of wonderful friends there, certainly. I’m divorced now, but my wife, Jan, and I moved up there because of Mike and Amy McDonald. Mike and Amy moved there and just loved it, and encouraged us to come up there and live, and so we did. My two younger children — my son Rain, who’s 25, and my daughter, Madison — were born there, so certainly there’s a great fondness for the town for the children being born there and the friendships we made, and the children’s friendships.

You know, it’s a very idyllic place to live. For me it was a little impractical work-wise, because I was constantly flying or driving to L.A. I think that Santa Barbara’s just a beautiful place to live, especially if you live down on Padaro Lane. And you have money and you don’t have anything to do. It’s kind of that kind of town. It’s just one of the greatest places in the world to live, but it’s not a great place to make a living.

JM: “Sailing” is an iconic song that people still love today. How did that song come together?

CC: It’s hard to tell where songs come from. They seem to be channeled from some other source, and you just happen to be the recipient of that. I think most writers feel that way.

To me it’s a song about transition. I think that people take the very literal metaphor about sailing, and it’s pleasant for that purpose.

But the song to me is about transition through art. The canvas — it’s a painter’s canvas, or ballet, or any type of art where you experience transition through interaction with it. So that’s what the song’s really about. It takes you away to a special place where only art can take you. So that’s the meaning of the song. A lot of people just think it’s just the serenity of sailing around in a boat. But not everybody has the money to sail around in a boat.

I did have somebody who took me sailing when I was younger. It was a little bitty boat, and there was some nice camaraderie there, and I think maybe that has something to do with why I chose that metaphor.

I joke that if he’d have taken me bowling then it would’ve been about bowling. The sailing part is a very surface metaphor.

JM: Another of your classic songs is “Arthur’s Theme.” Can you tell me about the collaborative process for that song?

CC: I was the new artist, and everything had just happened with the Grammys, so I was asked to score the picture, which I had never done but was excited to do. But then Steven Gordon, who wrote Arthur and directed it, was sort of new to the game — this was his directorial debut — and he just felt insecure about having somebody new do the music. So they gave it to Burt Bacharach to do, which is certainly understandable. I wasn’t really disappointed, because Burt’s certainly a legendary artist. They gave it to him, so I just kind of walked away from it.

But I’d been working on some ideas. So anyway, Burt called me and said that he was going to score the picture, but that they still wanted to work on the title track for the movie — he and Carole Bayer Sager, who he was married to at the time —- they still wanted to write the title song. Would I be interested in writing the title song with them? I was incredibly flattered. I’m a huge fan of Burt’s, and I’ve been influenced by him my whole career, like almost all pop writers have.

So I went to Burt’s house — it was kind of heady — but I went to their house in Beverly Hills, and Burt and Carole and I wrote the song with some involvement from Peter Allen, which is a long story. Peter wasn’t there, but for the song we used some lyrics from a song he and Carole had written previously — actually, the chorus.

It was just a great opportunity for me to sit with one of the most iconic writers of my generation. Then Burt and I subsequently wrote a song for the Olympics [“A Chance for Heaven”] and a couple of other things. But he’s a very nice, brilliant man, and Carole’s a great lyricist. It was kind of one of those things when I’m at the house that night and you have to pinch yourself. When I walked in, Burt had two Oscars on his mantle already. So it was a little heady.

But it was wonderful, and they were very happy with the song when we finished it that night. They were talking about Oscar nominations and stuff, and I just thought, you know, this is insane. I mean, I’d just won the Grammys and everything, and I would never in a million years imagined being in that circle, of being eligible to win an Oscar. And of course it ended up being right. But the whole thing was kind of a fairy tale.

— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his web site, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.