Songfacts®:

• Jim Croce grew up in Pennsylvania, but moved to New York City with his wife Ingrid in 1968 so they could pursue a music career. New York never felt like "home" to Jim, and he and Ingrid returned to Pennsylvania a few years later. Ingrid said in a Songfacts interview: "It was 1971, and we had just moved back from New York and we had moved into a little farmhouse. We had really no money to live on, we'd left New York very discouraged that our music hadn't made it on our first album, so Jim got a job driving a truck and I was doing pottery in a little farmhouse. So one day we found out that we were going to have a son, and Jim's background was such that you had to be very responsible, and a really strong Italian family with the eldest son to the eldest son had some responsibility to kind of be an example. So we found out that we were going to have a child, he realized it was his last chance to make it in the music business. He sat down at the table and he wrote 'Time In A Bottle' and 'You Don't Mess Around With Jim,' and at least two or three other songs from the first album and put them all down on one little cassette and sent them out, and that was the beginning of his career, really, in terms of songwriting and acceptability and acknowledgment and celebrity. Songs can change people's lives, whether they're writing them or they're listening to them."
  
  Ingrid Croce moved to San Diego and opened Croce's Restaurant & Jazz Bar there in 1985.
• According to Ingrid Croce, the idea for this song came when they were driving away from New York City toward their new home in Lyndell, Pennsylvania (population at the time: 138). Somewhere in New Jersey, they parked in a Howard Johnson's parking lot and slept in their car for the night. The sight of the New York City skyline gave Jim the idea for the song.