I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song

Jim Croce died in a plane crash in Natchitoches, Louisiana, September 29, 1973. "I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song" hit #9 in the US posthumously in 1974.

Croce's wife Ingrid has an autobiographical cookbook, Thyme In A Bottle, in which she writes interesting anecdotes about Jim. Here's what she wrote about this: "One weekend, after being on the road for many months, Jim got a chance to come home to relax with his family. We settled in to enjoy our time alone together. Though Jim was expecting company the next day, avoiding confrontation he never told me that we were to be joined by an entire film crew! The next morning, 15 people from Acorn Productions descended upon our house to record a promotional film of Jim Croce at Home on the Farm. I prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner for the whole film crew and after the group left, I questioned Jim about our finances. After a year and a half of his working so very hard on the road, we were barely making ends meet, but Jim wouldn't talk about it. He hated questions as much as he hated confrontation, especially about money. He stormed out of our bedroom and went down to the kitchen table to brood. The next morning he woke me gently by singing his new song. 'Every time I tried to tell you the words just came out wrong. So I'll have to say I love you, in a song.'"

Terry Cashman and Tommy West were Croce's producers, and they did their best to replicate the sound of Croce's live performances on the records. In a Songfacts interview with Terry Cashman, he said: "We would set Jim up in a booth and he would play guitar and sing. And then we'd have Maury Muehleisen baffled off in a kind of a booth of his own in the studio, the most we would use on a track would be bass drums and maybe a keyboard. We would record Jim's vocal live. All those vocals, except for 'I Got A Name,' are live vocals done with the band. So they have a certain sound to them that is unusual because of that. Most people, especially today, wouldn't do a live record at all because of computers. But even in the late '60s and early '70s when we did those records, people would do tracks without a vocal, and then add the vocal later. But we thought it was very important to capture that live feeling. Because Jim sang with the guitar, and Maury played with him as Jim sang. So if you hear them live they'll sound a lot like the record, even though it's only two instruments and just Jim singing, because of the similarity between the way that they sounded live and the way that we recorded them."