Time In A Bottle Operator That's Not The Way It Feels I Got A Name Jim Croce

Time In A Bottle Album: You Don't Mess Around With Jim (1972)
Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels) Album: You Don't Mess Around With Jim (1972)
I Got A Name Album: I Got A Name (1973)
by Jim Croce

"Time In a Bottle," was released in late 1973 as a single after Croce died in a plane crash.

Jim Croce wrote Time In A Bottle the night that he found out his wife, Ingrid, was pregnant. The couple had been married for five years, and Ingrid found out she was pregnant when she went to a fertility specialist. She recalls a mix of terror and delight in Jim's reaction when she told him the news. The child was a boy named Adrian, who grew up to become the singer-songwriter A.J. Croce.

"Time In A Bottle" hit #1 in America 14 weeks after Croce was killed in a plane crash. Croce started touring after he completed his last album, I Got A Name. On September 30, 1973 a plane carrying Croce and five others crashed upon takeoff as he was leaving one college venue to another 70 miles away. No one survived the accident, and among those killed was Maury Muehleisen, who played guitar on Croce's albums. Terry Cashman, who produced Croce, told us, "Jim and Maury got together and all of the sudden Jim started writing these great songs, and Maury came up with these really wonderful guitar parts - the two guitars were like an orchestra."

"Time In A Bottle" entered the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the week ending December 1, 1973 and finally reached #1 for the week ending December 29, a little over three months after he died.

Time In A Bottle was never intended to be a single - it was released on Croce's first major-label solo album You Don't Mess Around With Jim in 1972. The album had already yielded the #8 title track and #17 "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)." His second LP, Life And Times, had given Croce his first #1 single, "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown." "Time In A Bottle" became a hit over a year after it was first released when it was used in the ABC made-for-TV movie She Lives, about a woman dying of cancer.

The song's producer, Terry Cashman, was less than thrilled with the idea of recycling old songs, but ABC Records management loved the idea and OK'ed the use of Time In A Bottle in She Lives. The movie aired September 12, 1973 (as Croce was putting the finishing touches on his I Got A Name LP). Television stations were deluged with telephone calls from viewers who wanted to know where to buy the song. The next day, ABC Records had received orders for 50,000 copies of You Don't Mess Around With Jim, with sales of about 200,000 by the end of September 1973.

Time In A Bottle was also included in the soundtrack of the movie The Last American Hero.

The international drug lord in the movie The Hangover 2 sings Time In A Bottle while he and the gang are going up an elevator in Bangkok to make a money for hostage deal.

Time In A Bottle was featured in a 2016 commercial for the iPhone 6, where Cookie Monster (of Sesame Street fame), uses the hands-free Siri function to set a timer for the cookies he's baking and play his "waiting" playlist. This is the first song, and as it plays, Cookie Monster gets agitated waiting for his treats. When he asks Siri to check the timer, only a minute has passed.

Ingrid Croce, who was married to Jim from 1966 until his death in 1973, told the story of this song: "'Operator' is one of my favorite songs. I think it's a pretty interesting song in the way in which it was composed. It's probably like a lot of songs of Jim's, but it's one that I think a lot of people relate to in a whole bunch of different ways.

Jim and I had gotten married in 1966, and we had been waiting for him to go in the service. He was a National Guard, which he had joined with the hope that he would not be sent over, and he would be able to continue his education and his music career. So he signed up for the National Guard, and just as soon as we decided to get married - in August of 1966, the week before our little wedding - he got a letter that said that he would be leaving within two weeks for his National Guard duty down in South or North Carolina, so he was leaving with a very heavy heart.

My dad had been very ill and shortly after that passed away. And we had just waited... wanted to get married and have some time to be together after all those years of waiting. All of the sudden here he is the National Guard, and Jim is not very good with authority. And he's in the South, and they were not very good with making pasta. He was missing good food, he was missing me, he was missing life in general.

He's one of the few guys I think who went through basic training twice... he really couldn't follow the system. He'd always find things that were funny, like a handbook that he put together in dealing with the service with a whole bunch of quotes of how to deal with people in the Army.