The Long Distance Between a Radio and a Stage
After the Radio
Side A
On Christopher Cross, childhood survival, and the strange mercy of a song arriving before language could.
Alone in the Room
Sometimes going alone isn't loneliness. Sometimes it's the only way a memory can sit down beside you without interruption.
I expected a concert. I didn't expect the years to answer back.
I went alone to see Christopher Cross at the Spokane Tribal Casino.
That small detail matters more than I expected it to.
There's a particular honesty to attending a concert by yourself. No one beside you to turn the moment into conversation. No shared glance to make the emotion socially manageable. No familiar buffer. No background noise. No one asking if you are okay before you've had time to understand what's moved through you.
Just the room.
The stage.
The songs.
And the strangest company of your own younger self.
I knew I'd enjoy the show.
I expected the beautiful songs, clean musicianship, familiar melodies, and that unmistakable voice I'd known for most of my life.
I didn't expect to be so moved by it.
I didn't expect to keep getting choked up.
I didn't expect the evening to reach backward through time and touch the child who first heard those songs through a radio, long before she understood why they mattered so much to her.
That's the strange thing about music.
Sometimes it's been caring for us longer than we've known how to say.
I thought I was going to hear songs I'd loved for so long.
I didn't expect to meet the part of me that had needed them.
For some people, Christopher Cross belongs to a radio era. He belongs to a late seventies and early eighties light, to immaculate arrangements, to songs that seem to move across water without disturbing it.
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He belongs to Grammy history, to soft rock, to a particular kind of American melody that sounds easy until you realize how much grace it takes to make anything feel that effortless.
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For me, he belonged somewhere more private.
He belonged to my childhood.
Not the golden kind of childhood that people can polish into nostalgia.
The other kind.
The kind where a child learns the weather of a room before she learns the names of what's happening inside it. The kind of childhood where the body becomes fluent in tension long before the mind has language for fear.
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When childhood includes abuse, music doesn't always enter as entertainment.
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Sometimes it enters as mercy.
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Sometimes it's the only gentle thing in the room.
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I couldn't have explained that then.
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I didn't have words like trauma, regulation, hypervigilance, dissociation, CPTSD, or survival.
I only knew that certain songs made the world less sharp.
Certain voices softened the edges. Certain melodies seemed to arrive from another place entirely, a place where nobody was yelling, nobody was threatening, nobody was breaking the air into pieces.
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Christopher Cross had that kind of voice.
Not dramatic. Not forceful. Not trying to rescue anyone in the grand cinematic sense.
Gentler than that.
His voice didn't burst through the door.
It came through the radio.
That may be why it lasted.
For children who grow up frightened, gentleness can feel almost unreal.
A calm voice can become evidence.
Evidence that somewhere, beyond the room you're standing in, there's another kind of world.
A world with smoother edges. A world where sound doesn't have to warn you. A world where beauty can enter quietly and not ask anything from you.
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Many survivors know this, even if we arrive at it through different songs.
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For one person it was gospel on a kitchen radio.
For another, Fleetwood Mac in the backseat.
For someone else, metal through headphones loud enough to build a wall around the body.
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For me, one of those merciful voices was Christopher Cross,
floating through the ordinary air with an almost impossible calm.
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The artist changes.
The need never does.
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Children don't always know the difference between loving a song and being helped by it.
They don't know they're being regulated.
They don't know their nervous system has found a small place to rest.
They don't know that three or four minutes of beauty can become a bridge over something they can't yet name.
They only know the song came on.
They only know the room changed.
They only know they could breathe in that moment.
When the Voice Stepped Out of the Speakers
So, when I sat there all these years later, at the Spokane Tribal Casino, and saw him standing directly in front of me onstage, the feeling wasn't simple nostalgia anymore.
It was recognition.
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The voice that had once reached me through the airwaves was no longer distant. It wasn't attached to an old car radio, or a childhood room, or the ghost-light of memory.
That voice was attached to its body and was standing right there in front of me.
Alive.
Very much so present.
Still carrying an unmistakable gentleness.
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And that undid me a little.
More than once.
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It surprised me how emotional I became because the show itself wasn't heavy. It was warm, generous & beautifully done. There was humor in the room, affection in the audience, and the quiet pleasure of watching people respond to songs they have carried for decades.
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But beneath that, something older was happening.
I was sitting close enough to see not a symbol, not a memory, not a polished remnant of another era, but a living artist still doing the work.
Still singing.
Still playing.
Still standing inside the very thing he was made to do.​​
It wasn't nostalgia.
It was recognition.
Still There. Still Singing.
There's something deeply moving about watching an artist continue for many years.
Not as some kind of a museum piece.
Not as nostalgia.
Not as someone being brought out for applause from another decade.
But as a living person, still faithful to the music, still showing up inside the work, still giving himself to the thing that shaped his life.
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That touched me far more than I expected.
Because survival recognizes survival.
Devotion recognizes devotion.
And art, when it's deeply authentic, keeps speaking long after this world's finished labeling it.
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There are artists we admire because they impress us.
There are artists we love because they've accompanied us.
Those aren't the same thing at all.
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One earns applause.
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The other earns a permanent address inside our soul.
Christopher Cross never knew he was keeping me company in some of the darkest, as well as in some of the best moments of my life.
Of course he didn't literally, maybe, but unmistakably. I like to think that some part of the artist travels with their work & artists rarely know all the rooms their art's entered.
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They don't know which child heard them from the backseat,
which teenager listened in the dark,
which adult would one day sit near a stage in Spokane and realize that a song she thought she simply loved had actually been kind to her.
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That's one of art’s most mysterious forms of work.
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Authentic art slips into places no one's ever introduced it to.
(Let alone been invited into.)
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It enters years the artist never sees.
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It becomes part of
private survival, private memory, private repair.
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And then,
if time is generous,
the listener gets one astonishing evening where the old distance collapses inside itself.
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The radio suddenly becomes a stage.
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The memory becomes a room.
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The child and the woman sit together in the same body,
listening.
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That's what happened for me.
By the end of the night, my emotion didn't feel like sadness.
It felt closer to gratitude.
A soft and complicated gratitude,
but gratitude all the same.
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For the songs.
For the calm.
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For the years they traveled with me without asking to be noticed.
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For the proof that beauty can reach a child before language does.
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For the strange mercy of music finding the broken places first, sitting down quietly beside them, and staying.
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When I applauded, it didn't feel like ordinary applause.
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It felt like saying thank you across time.
Not just for a concert.
For a kindness he couldn't have known he'd given.