At This Moment

Billy Vera talked about the inspiration for this song when he spoke with Eric Greenberg on the Just My Show podcast. Said Vera: "I was living still in New York, and I met a young college girl, about 20 years old. We started dating – she told me she had just broken up with her boyfriend, and she described what he went through when she gave him the bad news. And she was very descriptive. So I went home and I was impressed by what he must have been feeling. I wrote the first two-thirds of the song based on my imagination of what this guy was feeling. And I couldn't finish it, I just couldn't figure out how it ended. And then about 9-10 months later, when she broke up with me, I had gotten very emotionally involved with her, and then I knew how the song ended. And that was the famous line that everybody remembers: 'I'd subtract 20 years of my life.' We stayed in touch for a long time. She was one of these sort of narcissistic girls that like the idea of somebody mooning over her for years, and I did."

Billy Vera was born William McCord Jr. He had some success as a songwriter with the #1 country hit "I Really Got the Feeling," which Dolly Parton recorded. He wrote "At This Moment" in 1977, but no one wanted to record it, although Dionne Warwick and Olivia Newton-John came close to doing so. Billy Vera And The Beaters finally released it in 1981 as the followup to their first single, "I Can Take Care of Myself" (#39 in the US) on the Japanese-owned Alfa label, and it stalled at #79 on the charts. The song was revived when it was used in three episodes of the hit TV show Family Ties in 1985 and 1986, as a backdrop for romantic interludes between Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox) and Ellen Reed (played by Tracy Pollan, who became Fox's wife in real life). Vera told Just My Show: "I thought that was gonna be it. You know, everybody had high hopes for that song. But they wanted to put out an up-tempo song to start off the album, and they did. They had a very good promotion man, Bernie was his name. And he wasn't getting along with the boss. So he quit just as 'At This Moment' came out. The guy they hired to take his place, he couldn't have promoted the Beatles. He was this terrible promotion man. So that's why 'At This Moment' didn't do what it should have done. And as it turns out, very often, it was better that it happened five years later."

The first Billy Vera & The Beaters album was recorded live, so when this was used in Family Ties, only the live version existed. Vera explains: "We re-recorded pieces of the song. In other words, they'd need 12 seconds here, or 20 seconds there in the show. So we went in and recorded just those pieces in the studio without the audience, because the audience would have been annoying, to the TV viewer. The thing that made it work better the second time was that the story of the song, boy-loses-girl, was the story of the episode, "Boy Loses Girl." The first time they used the song, it was when he met the girl."