You Don't Mess Around With Jim

iTunes Review

Jim Croce had previously released an album with his wife Ingrid before making his commercial breakthrough with his ABC Records’ debut, 1972’s You Don’t Mess Around With Jim. The album’s title track — about pool shark “Big” Jim Walker and not Jim Croce the songwriter — and "Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)" established Croce as both a great tale spinner and a compassionate and touching singer-songwriter. But his true emotive connection came with “Time In A Bottle,” a song that would shoot to #1 on the pop charts after Croce’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1973. His short-lived career already had plenty of highlights, many of which are featured here. The hits are readily familiar but the same loner identity and straightforward honesty can be heard in his ballad of alienation “New York’s Not My Home,” his call for hope “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day,” and his knack for capturing the sorrow and nostalgia for an irretrievable past in “Photographs and Memories.”