The 10-Year Story Of REO Speedwagon’s “Time For Me To Fly”

It All Began During Cronin’s First Road Trip

REO Speedwagon’s seventh studio album titled “You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish” included the single “Time for Me to Fly” which became their first top 40 hit. It regained popularity after it was featured on the Netflix series Ozark.

Written by frontman Kevin Cronin, he talked about how he spent a decade working on it when he recently appeared on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show. He told Uncle Joe Benson, “A buddy of mine and I just packed up and went to Colorado in my freshman year at college – my first road trip. Another guy who’d been at high school with us lived out in Boulder. One morning we said, ‘Let’s just go to Boulder. Let’s go. We’re off!’”

He added, “When we got out there, this friend of mine, Dave Drury, he had this beautiful Guild acoustic guitar, and it was in this weird tuning that I’d never played before. I picked it up and started strumming this thing. It was like, ‘Wow!’ It was an open tuning, which I’d never even heard of before. I started ‘Time for Me to Fly.’”

Cronin drew inspiration from his breakup with his high school girlfriend. He explained, “But I only wrote the verses, I didn’t have a chorus for it. It got as far as ‘I make you laugh, you make me cry’ – it just didn’t quite pay off. I always had those verses kinda in the back of my head. Years later, ‘I make you laugh, you make me cry / I believe it’s time for me to fly.’ Then I had the chorus, just in time for the Tuna Fish record.”

Check out the song below.