In late 1986 or early 1987, producer and head of Millennium Records, Jimmy Ienner, asked Previte about writing some music for "a little movie called Dirty Dancing".

A song by Lionel Richie was initially planned to be used as the finale of Dirty Dancing,[6] but choreographer Kenny Ortega and his assistant Miranda Garrison (who also played Vivian in the film) selected "The Time of My Life" instead.

The demo version finally appeared on the 1998 CD reissue of Previte's 1981 album Franke and the Knockouts, but is only listed as a "Bonus Track".

The movie's writer, Eleanor Bergstein, wanted a famous 1960s singer to perform it to blend then-contemporary musical elements with the aesthetics of the period.

[10] In response, Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers was approached by Jimmy Ienner repeatedly over two months to do the recording, but he also turned it down because his daughter McKenna was due to be born, and he had promised his wife he would be there.

He was also concerned about appearing in another song that would flop (as had happened with "Loving on Borrowed Time" with Gladys Knight, from the soundtrack for Cobra) and also thought the title was "like a bad porno movie".

[13] Stephen Holden of The New York Times compared the duo of Medley and Warnes to the lead characters' romance in Dirty Dancing, for a "blend of the earthy and the pristine".

[20] In a 2009 retrospective about movie theme songs, Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly ranked "Time of My Life" as "great schlock".

[22] Then in 2023, Lindsay Martell of Entertainment Weekly ranked Dirty Dancing as having the fourth best movie soundtrack of the 1980s and called "Time of My Life" the "unofficial anthem for every dreamy-eyed teen in the summer of '87".