“Southern Cross” is a song written by Stephen Stills, Rick Curtis, and Michael Curtis and performed by the rock band Crosby, Stills & Nash. It was featured on the band’s Daylight Again album and was released as a single in September 1982. Stephen Stills sings lead vocals throughout, with Graham Nash joining the second verse. Because David Crosby did not rejoin the band until the album was already underway, his vocals are not featured on the album version of the song, although he did appear in the video and subsequently sang the song with the group in live performances. The single was a success on the charts, reaching #18 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in late November and early December 1982.
The song’s lyrics are about a man who sails the Pacific following a failed love affair. During the voyage, the singer takes comfort in sailing (“We got eighty feet of the waterline / Nicely making way”), in the beauty of the sea, and particularly in the Southern Cross, a constellation by which sailors in the Southern Hemisphere have traditionally navigated. (The Southern Cross is not visible from most of the Northern Hemisphere, the more tropical latitudes being the exception.) But his final consolation is music. (“I have my ship / And all her flags are a-flyin’ / She is all that I have left/ And music is her name.”) The last lyric is filled with sad irony as he tries to convince himself that he will eventually forget his former lover, although he knows this will never happen any more than he can forget the beauty of the Southern Cross. (“Somebody fine will come along and make me forget about loving you / And the Southern Cross.”)