Song · Jim Croce
“Time In A Bottle” by Jim Croce
From the album You Don’t Mess Around With Jim (1972)
“Time In A Bottle” by Jim Croce appears on 4 radio countdowns from 4 stations between 2001 and 2026. It was first released in 1972 on the album You Don’t Mess Around With Jim. Its best result is #520 on the WYEP Greatest Songs of All Time. In the combined RockLists rankings it is #2,305 indie & aaa song of all time.
Jim Croce wrote the words to "Time in a Bottle" after his wife, Ingrid, told him in December 1970 that she was pregnant. It surfaced on You Don't Mess Around with Jim, his third album, on ABC in 1972, with Terry Cashman and Tommy West producing, and West found its most striking color by chance: a harpsichord somebody had left behind in the mixing studio.
For a while it was an album track, heard in the 1973 TV movie She Lives! Then Croce was killed in a plane crash that September, radio took the song up, and the demand for a single grew until ABC put one out. It finished a two-week run at number one in early January 1974, his second and last American chart-topper and only the third posthumous number one in Billboard history, after Otis Redding and Janis Joplin.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Indie & Adult Alternative
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 1362 | WFPK | WFPK 2001 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2000 |
| 2020 | 1402 | WXPN | WXPN 2020 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2020 |
| 2022 | 838 | 90.9 The Bridge | 90.9 The Bridge Top 909 Songs of the '70s | 908 |
| 2026 | 520 | WYEP | WYEP Greatest Songs of All Time | 1180 |
Also listed as: Time in a Bottle.
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