The 1980s File Feature
This Is The Time
This Is the Time: Billy Joel's Farewell Gift from The Bridge "This Is the Time" was released by Billy Joel as a single from his 1986 album The Bridge, a reco…
01 The Story
This Is the Time: Billy Joel's Farewell Gift from The Bridge
"This Is the Time" was released by Billy Joel as a single from his 1986 album The Bridge, a record that arrived at a pivotal moment in the pianist's career and in American popular music more broadly. The Bridge was Joel's eleventh studio album, released on Columbia Records in July 1986, and it appeared after the massive commercial success of An Innocent Man in 1983, which had reaffirmed Joel's position as one of the most commercially reliable songwriters in American pop. The new album attempted to move forward stylistically while retaining the melodic craftsmanship and emotional directness that had built Joel's audience.
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 15, 1986, debuting at number 78. Its ascent was gradual but sustained, reflecting the pattern of Joel's most successful ballad singles: they built through word-of-mouth and radio repetition rather than exploding out of the gate. The song climbed steadily through November and December of 1986 before peaking at number 18 during the week of January 31, 1987. It spent 17 weeks on the chart, a run that demonstrated the loyalty of Joel's radio audience and the song's particular effectiveness in the adult contemporary formats that had become increasingly important to his commercial profile.
The Bridge was produced by Phil Ramone, Joel's long-time production collaborator who had worked with him on a string of landmark albums including The Stranger, 52nd Street, Glass Houses, and An Innocent Man. The Ramone-Joel partnership was one of the most productive in American pop, characterized by a shared commitment to sophisticated arrangements, live-feeling performances, and production values that prioritized the emotional authenticity of Joel's voice and piano over sonic trickery. For "This Is the Time," Ramone created a setting of considerable warmth, using orchestral elements and layered vocal harmonies to amplify the song's nostalgic emotional register.
"This Is the Time" is explicitly a song about memory and impermanence, written with the awareness that certain moments in life carry a heightened significance that is often only recognized in retrospect. The lyric addresses a companion in the present tense while simultaneously acknowledging that this present will become the past, that the experience being shared will eventually be recalled rather than lived. This temporal duality gave the song an unusual emotional resonance that listeners found particularly apt for graduations, farewells, and other transitional life events.
The track became especially associated with high school graduation ceremonies in the United States during the late 1980s, a cultural adoption that amplified its radio presence and extended its commercial life beyond what chart data alone could measure. Joel's music had always connected deeply with working- and middle-class American listeners who found in his Long Island perspectives a recognizable version of their own experiences, and "This Is the Time" spoke to universal themes of transition and loss that transcended any specific demographic.
Billy Joel's career by 1986 had produced an extraordinary body of hit singles, from "Piano Man" in 1973 through the string of number-one records that made the late 1970s and early 1980s his most commercially dominant period. The Bridge was a less uniformly successful album than its immediate predecessors, but it produced several strong singles including "A Matter of Trust" and "Modern Woman" alongside "This Is the Time." The album demonstrated Joel's ability to evolve his sound while preserving the melodic and emotional qualities that had built his audience.
Columbia Records supported the album with a promotional campaign that included an extensive tour, reinforcing the personal, intimate quality of songs like "This Is the Time" with the energy of Joel's reputation as one of rock's great live performers. The song appeared in setlists throughout this period and became a genuine crowd-pleaser, its emotional directness translating effectively from studio recording to arena performance.
02 Song Meaning
Living in the Present While Grieving the Future: The Themes of "This Is the Time"
"This Is the Time" explores a specific and difficult emotional paradox: the experience of being fully present in a beautiful moment while simultaneously grieving its inevitable passing. This is not a song about loss that has already occurred but about the anticipatory sadness of knowing that what is happening right now, in all its vividness and warmth, will eventually become memory. Billy Joel had explored related themes throughout his career, but here he rendered the feeling with particular economy and clarity.
The lyric operates through direct address, speaking to a "you" who is sharing the present moment with the narrator. This intimate structure creates a sense of complicity: the song invites the listener not just to observe the emotion but to recognize it in their own experience of significant time. Most people have lived through moments that felt, even as they were occurring, like something that would be remembered for a long time, and Joel's lyric names that experience with precision.
The phrase "this is the time to remember" functions as both an instruction and an acknowledgment of memory's selectivity. Not all time is remembered equally; certain experiences are encoded at a higher resolution than others, and the song asserts that the present moment qualifies for this elevated status. The implicit question the lyric raises is why this moment, and the answer it suggests is that shared experience, especially at transitional junctures, concentrates emotional significance in ways that ordinary time cannot.
The production by Phil Ramone serves the lyric's emotional ambitions through deliberate restraint. The arrangement builds from a simple piano foundation, adding orchestral elements gradually in ways that amplify rather than overwhelm the intimacy of Joel's vocal. This approach was characteristic of the Ramone-Joel collaboration: the production always supported the song's emotional logic rather than imposing a separate aesthetic agenda.
The song's particular resonance with graduation ceremonies and life transitions is not accidental. Graduations are precisely the kind of occasion the lyric describes: a moment of heightened communal experience at a transitional juncture, shared with people who have been part of a significant chapter of life and who are about to disperse into their separate futures. The song gives language to what people feel at such moments but rarely articulate: the bittersweet awareness that the chapter is ending and that the ending is also a beginning.
Joel's vocal performance carries what might be called earned sentiment, a quality distinct from sentimentality in that it reflects genuine emotional experience rather than performed feeling. His voice in 1986 had the lived-in quality of an artist who had been writing and singing about human emotional experience for over fifteen years, and that accumulated weight gives the delivery of "This Is the Time" a credibility that a younger artist attempting the same material might have struggled to achieve.
Philosophically, the song belongs to a long tradition of lyric poetry that meditates on the passage of time and the relationship between present experience and future memory. From the Romantic poets through the modernist lyric, this territory had been explored with enormous sophistication; Joel's achievement was to render its essential emotional content in a pop idiom accessible to a mass audience without sacrificing its genuine intellectual and emotional weight. The 17-week chart run and peak at number 18 on the Hot 100 confirmed that this combination of accessibility and depth was commercially as well as artistically viable.
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