| Right in Time | |
| Cover: | File:Lucinda_WIlliams_-_Right_in_Time_promo_single.png |
| Caption: | promotional CD single artwork |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Lucinda Williams |
| Album: | Car Wheels on a Gravel Road |
| Released: | 1998 |
| Genre: |
|
| Label: | Mercury |
| Producer: | Steve Earle, Ray Kennedy, Lucinda Williams |
| Prev Title: | Something About What Happens When We Talk |
| Prev Year: | 1993 |
| Next Title: | Can't Let Go |
| Next Year: | 1998 |
"Right in Time" is a song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. It was released in 1998 as the first single from her fifth album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998).
The song was featured on the season one soundtrack album to the Showtime series The L Word.[2] Sarah McLachlan selected the track for inclusion on her Artist's Choice compilation album in 2004.[3]
A review of the song from AllMusic stated: "Few artists could conjure a sense of yearning for an absent lover the way Lucinda Williams does in 'Right in Time', making physical the painful nature of unsatisfied and overwhelming longing, [the song] moves to a feeling of immediacy as the chorus enters, shifting the tone from longing, twangy guitars propelling the chorus--'The way you move, it's right in time/It's right in time with me.' The song then segues into the more intimate setting of Lucinda's private world, where time slows down to a stagger, 'I take off my watch and my earrings/My bracelets and everything/Lie on my back and moan at the ceiling...Think about you and that long ride/I bite my nails, I get weak inside/Reach over and turn off the light/Oh my baby' drawn out in such a low, aching moan that the return of the guitars and closing chorus is a palpable release.[4]
LA Weekly ranked "Right in Time" at No. 8 on their list of Williams' best 11 songs,[5] while music website Return of Rock ranked it No. 3 on their list.[6] Pitchfork wrote that the song includes some of her "most irreducible, eloquent poetry—'Not a day goes by I don’t think about you/You left your mark on me, it’s permanent, a tattoo'—before becoming a moaned narrative of a woman alone in bed, pleasuring herself. It is unbelievably sensual, a daydream."[7] NME observed that the song is "rich in meaning, pulsing with the thrill of love remembered, and hurting with the chill of absence."[8]
In a five-star-out-of-five review of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau observed "from the album's very first lines-in which the flat 'Not a day goes by I don't think about you' sets up the ambush of 'You left your mark on me, it's permanent [pause, we need a rhyme fast] a tattoo [gotcha!]', which is instantly trumped by 'Pierce the skin, the blood runs through' and then swoons into a forlorn, unutterably simple 'Oh my baby'-Williams's every picked-over word and effect has something to say.[9]