Nick of Time

Raitt wrote it in 1988, a year after getting sober, mostly during a week-long retreat in Mendocino, California. She made the demo on a Yamaha portable keyboard, guitars, a Fostex four-track cassette recorder and a Roland TR-606 drum machine, with the microphone hung from a lamp, and played it to Don Was, who loved it and asked to produce her. At Ocean Way in Hollywood the arrangement followed the demo. She wanted a heartbeat pulse like Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine, and with no hand drum available Ricky Fataar played a burlap sandbag used to weigh down mic stands, on his lap, with a microphone on it. Raitt sings and plays electric piano, with Michael Landau on guitar, Hutch Hutchinson on bass, Paulinho da Costa on congas, and Arnold McCuller and Sir Harry Bowens singing backing vocals.

She told Marc Myers it came from a part of her that had not yet seen daylight. The first verse is about a heartbroken friend nearing middle age who wanted a baby. The second came from watching her elderly father asleep in the car on a road trip and seeing in him what it is for a body to age; the third turns to a bigger, more universal love. The double meaning of the title, arriving just in time and the nicks that time leaves, was plain to her. Writing it gave her a confidence that broke through a stifling self-doubt, and she stopped comparing herself to Jackson Browne and Randy Newman. She told the Library of Congress it was "an unusual topic for a pop song".

Since

As a single, backed with The Road's My Middle Name, it reached No. 92 on the Hot 100, No. 10 on the adult contemporary chart and No. 16 in Australia. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015. It is her most played original, with 333 performances logged on setlist.fm, and was in her set at the Paradiso in Amsterdam a month after the album came out.

Bon Iver paired it with I Can't Make You Love Me on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2011 and put the medley on the B-side of Calgary. Lake Street Dive recorded it on a Boston sidewalk as the lead single of their 2022 covers EP Fun Machine: The Sequel. In 2024 Bon Iver sampled it in his remix of Charli XCX's I think about it all the time, which Raitt called a really artful job that left her honoured. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official music video, with the studio recording.