Ride Like the Wind

Cross wrote it and Omartian produced; the album track runs 4:32 and the single edit 3:56, released on January 30, 1980 with "Minstrel Gigolo" on the B-side. The inner sleeve dedicates it to Lowell George of Little Feat. It grew from live jams with the band over Wings' "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" in a Houston club where audiences danced, and Cross wrote the words on the way down from Houston to Austin. It is a first-person outlaw fleeing a hanging toward the Mexican border; Cross said that growing up in San Antonio there was always an anarchistic allure about escaping the authority if you could get to Mexico. Warner preferred "Say You'll Be Mine" as a single, and Omartian persuaded them to lead with this.

Mix reports it was the first song recorded for the album, at Amigo Studios in Burbank on a Harrison console and two Ampex 24-tracks, with the Austin band cutting the basic track over two or three days. The demo had a straight rock beat, and the band changed to a four-on-the-floor kick that Omartian said made the thing hop from the beginning. Omartian added piano and Rhodes, Lenny Castro congas, Victor Feldman percussion, horns and 28 strings led by Assa Drori, with a wind effect from a sound library; Omartian insisted Cross play the solo himself. Cross sang answer vocals on the demo, then Omartian brought in Michael McDonald for the answers and release harmonies.

It reached 2 on the Hot 100 for four weeks behind Blondie's "Call Me", 3 in Canada, 25 in Australia and 69 in the UK, and was 17th on the year-end chart. Saxon covered it on Destiny (1988), East Side Beat took it to number 3 in the UK in 1991, and Laurent Wery with Joss Mendosah charted in Belgium in 2013. The first official video appeared on June 11, 2025 for the 45th anniversary, directed by Andrea Calvetti with an all-female cast racing classic cars on a desert road. SCTV parodied the recording session in 1981, and it appears in Anchorman 2. Setlist.fm counts 399 performances across 983 setlists, second only to "Sailing".