About the artist: Jim Croce (1943 - 1973) was an American folk and rock singer-songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973, Croce released five studio albums, but died in a plain crash just as the big successes started to come for him. He left behind a string of the best ballads ever written. Jim Croce currently has four songs in my list of about 200 best pop/rock songs of all time.
About the song: Time in a bottle is a track from the 1972 album You don't mess around with Jim. Croce may be best remembered from upbeat songs like You don't mess around with Jim and especially Bad bad Leroy Brown, but his real strength was in his ballads, in particular Time in a bottle. For me this is one of the most tender love ballads of all time. The lyrics are stunningly beautiful ("If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do is to save everyday till eternity passes away, just to spend them with you") and in one passage resigned in a way that becomes even more sad given his fate ("But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you wanna do once you find them"). Run time 2:28.
