Jim Croce - Lost Time in a Bottle (2014)

Singer/songwriter Jim Croce enjoyed a too-brief career – just five studio albums in seven years, from 1966 until his tragic death in a small plane crash in 1973. Only five singles were released during his lifetime, three of them Top Ten hits, including the chart-topping “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” In the wake of Croce’s death, six more singles were released over the following couple of years, most notably “Time In A Bottle,” which went number one in 1973, and “I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song,” which hit number nine in 1974.

Croce’s imaginative mix of folksong storytelling, pop melodies, and late 1950s/early ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll innocence struck a chord with a mainstream audiences, albeit briefly, resulting in three Gold™ albums and seemingly endless possibilities. As record labels are want to do, various rights holders have released 18 compilation albums that have seemingly scraped the barrel clean of Croce’s extant recordings. The best of these discs is the posthumous Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits, released roughly a year after Croce’s death, the 14-track collection including all of the singer’s biggest hits and quickly achieving Platinum™ sales status.

On July 22nd, 2014 Cleopatra Records will release what is certain to be one of the more interesting of the post-millennial Croce compilations, Lost Time In A Bottle, and one that offers some long-lost new material. The 24 songs on the collection include rare demo versions of Croce hits like “Operator,” “Time In A Bottle,” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” among others, as well as ten live performances from a February 1973 concert at Harper College. The crown achievement of Lost Time In A Bottle, however, is a previously-unreleased 1964 radio broadcast from a Cazenovia College performance early in Croce’s career, the six songs clearly displaying his rapidly-maturing songwriting and storytelling skills.