THIS IS THE TIME - BILLY JOEL

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This Is The Time - BILLY JOEL

(Live At Shea Stadium)

“This Is the Time,” the third single from Billy Joel’s 1986 album The Bridge, is a mid-tempo ballad that treats memory as both consolation and warning. Written while Joel was married to Christie Brinkley and produced by Phil Ramone, the track builds from a spare piano-and-vocal opening into a fuller arrangement of drums, bass, guitars, and orchestration.

Billy Joel later described the song, in a 1997 Billboard interview, as being about holding onto a good stretch of a relationship because difficult periods will follow, not as a plea to freeze the moment in place. Contemporary trade reaction split along familiar lines: Billboard heard a “melancholy rock ballad from a doom-filled perspective,” while Cash Box praised the “wistful, melodic ballad” as further evidence of Joel’s songwriting craft. On the charts the record behaved exactly like a late-1980s adult-oriented ballad. Released in November 1986 with “Code of Silence” on the B-side, it entered the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-November, climbed steadily, and peaked at Number 18 on the chart dated January 31, 1987, spending 17 weeks on the list. It was far stronger on the Adult Contemporary chart, where it reached No. 1 for three weeks beginning January 10, 1987—Joel’s seventh leader on that tally—before yielding to Billy Vera & the Beaters’ “At This Moment.” Joel has rarely kept the piece in regular set lists, reserving it for occasions that already carry a sense of ending. One of the most pointed of those occasions came at Shea Stadium in Queens on July 16 and 18, 2008, the final concerts ever staged in the ballpark before its demolition. Joined by John Mayer on guitar and vocals, Joel performed “This Is the Time” as part of the two-night stand later documented on the 2011 album and film Live at Shea Stadium: The Concert.

In a stadium that had opened with the Beatles in 1965 and was about to close, the lyric about an old hotel being torn down acquired an extra layer of literal force. Mayer’s guitar lines lengthened the studio arrangement without overturning its reflective pace, and the roughly six-minute reading sits on the released album between Garth Brooks’ guest spot on “Shameless” and “Keeping the Faith.” Taken together, the single’s chart profile and the Shea reading illustrate how Joel’s ballads often outlast their initial pop rankings. At Shea, the same lyric that once soundtracked private remembrance became public valediction for a venue itself. The performance does not reinvent the song; it simply places its central claim, that the present is already becoming memory, inside a setting that was disappearing in real time.