REO Speedwagon released their seventh studio album with the memorable name You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish in April 1978. It was an important step towards the top division for the band.
The album was REO’s first to make the Top 40 in America. It peaked at #29 and was certified double platinum for sales over two million copies. Much of the credit for this success has to go to the two single hits Roll With the Changes and Time For Me To Fly which has since gone on to become two of the band’s best known songs.
The first of these singles was an energetic and driving rocker with catchy hooks, whereas Time For Me To Fly was much more of a prototype power ballad of the type that would become incredibly popular in the 1980s.
Carried by an irresistible melody, a heartfelt lyric and melodic vocal delivery, the song has a lovely build into each of its sections, providing the listener with continual emotional pay-offs. The handiwork that went into structuring the song is really quite solid.
Perhaps one should expect nothing less from a song that took ten years to finish?
The song was written by lead singer Kevin Cronin, and the topic is as reasonably straightforward as it is autobiographical. Just like the guy in the song, he found himself in a situation where he had to move on from a relationship, even though he still cared and knew it was going to hurt.
“I was in a relationship with this girl that I met in high school” he said about it years later in a TV interview. “She was my first love. But there was a point where I knew that I had to move on, but at the same time I found this hard to do, because I was so attached to her.”
He knew that it wasn’t working, and went to Colorado for a time-out. “A buddy of mine and I just packed up and went to Colorado in my freshman year at college – my first road trip,” Cronin said. “Another guy who’d been at high school with us lived out in Boulder. One morning we said, ‘Let’s just go to Boulder. Let’s go. We’re off!’
“When we got out there, this friend of mine, Dave Drury, he had this beautiful Guild acoustic guitar sitting on his porch. I went to play it, and it sounded horrible. I realised that it was in some kind of different, open tuning that I’d never played before. I remembered Richie Havens at Woodstock. When he played, he wrapped his thumb around the top of the neck, and I thought, ‘I’ll try that.’ I did, and sure enough, it sounded good. I started putting together Time for Me to Fly right then.”
Cronin soon had the verses written, inspired by his situation with his high school sweetheart – one of the very reasons he took the road trip from Chicago. “But I only wrote the verses, I didn’t have a chorus for it,” he explained. “It got as far as ‘I make you laugh, you make me cry’ – it just didn’t quite pay off. I always had those verses kinda in the back of my head. Years later, it became ‘I make you laugh, you make me cry / I believe it’s time for me to fly.’ Out of that I finally got the chorus, just in time for the Tuna Fish record.”
I’ve been around for you
I’ve been up and down for you
But I just can’t get any relief
I’ve swallowed my pride for you
I’ve lived and lied for you
But you still make me feel like a thief
You got me stealin’ your love away
‘Cause you never give it
Peeling the years away
And we can’t relive it
I make you laugh
And you make me cry
I believe it’s time for me to fly
The ballad Time for Me to Fly was released as the second single from the album in October 1978, peaking at #56 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a decent hit, especially in some territories, but the band had hoped for more.
Feeling that the song has more juice in the tank, the song was re-released in 1980 to promote the band’s compilation album A Decade of Rock and Roll: 1970 to 1980. This time, it went to #77 US. Again, the feeling was that the song could have done better.
Incredibly, the song would get a third chance to prove itself. When MTV went on the air on 1 August 1981, REO Speedwagon was one of the biggest acts in America thanks to the incredible success of Hi-Infidelity (1980). The immediate majority of music videos came from European acts at the time, so the network was desperate for more content from American musicians.
Even though the song was three years old at that time, and there was no music video for it, MTV felt that Time For Me To Fly had exactly what they were looking for.
They managed to film a live video (directed by Jay Dubin) of REO performing this song at McNichols Arena in Denver on 25 April 1981, and immediately put it in rotation. There was no single of the song to promote at the time, but it became incredibly popular and highly requested on MTV. No doubt it helped sell some REO albums.
Continued play on MTV was what finally broke the song on a mainstream level, and it would go on to become a massive American radio hit. Over the years it has become one of the band’s best-known songs and a staple of classic rock radio, with massive and continual airplay on American FM radio.
There is a sad postscript to the story of the song. Apparently, the girl that the song was written about has been missing for decades. “I literally just got a call from this mystery TV show – kind of a reality TV show – that the girl that I wrote Time for Me to Fly about went missing,” Cronin said in a Songfact interview in 2017. “Literally, went missing like, 30 years ago. And they were calling me. I declined to be filmed for the show.”
Fortunately there is a happier postscript as well. The song has just seen a recent resurgence in popularity after being featured on the Netflix crime drama Ozark. The episode Kevin Cronin Was Here (season 3, episode 3), features REO Speedwagon performing Time For Me To Fly live, along with lead character Wendy (played by Laura Linney) singing along to the song in her car.
This resulted in the song making the top 40 on the Billboard Digital Songs Chart – its best chart placement ever, 42 years after its initial release!
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