One Night Standards

Album: Never Will (2019)
Charted: 76
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Songfacts®:

  • Here, a lonely Ashley McBryde hooks up with a man in a hotel. The singer makes her message clear that their sexual encounter is a one-off.

    No I don't want a number you ain't gonna answer
    Let's just stick to the one night standards
  • McBryde co-penned "One Night Standards" with her "A Little Dive Bar In Dahlonega" co-writer Nicollete Hayford, and with Shane McAnally. McBryde and Hayford had already come up with the lines, "It ain't somethin' I wanna spend a lot of time in. I ain't gonna stay for the weekend." They knew that they were onto something special but were unsure how to take it further, so the pair took a break.

    "We had to walk away from it to give it a second to breathe," McBryde explained to ABC Radio. "When we got back… this time Shane [McAnally] was with us and I joked, 'You know, hotel rooms... they only have one nightstand for a reason. They're one night stand-ers.'"

    Hayford and McAnally's eyes lit up; they immediately recognized the singer's simple comment was the title they'd been looking for. From there, the three wrote the rest of the song, penning lyrics about setting the rules for a one-night stand.
  • Some people are not happy hearing a woman singing about one-night stands. However, McBryde feels she's entitled to give the female perspective. She told The Boot:

    "Some people feel that we shouldn't be doing that, but Loretta [Lynn] did it, Tammy [Wynette] did it. It happens all the time, so why not tackle it?
  • Directed by Reid Long and shot at Nashville's Drake Hotel, Ashley McBryde plays a motel receptionist who rents a room to a couple. She recognizes the man as a friend's father, and conflicted, she picks up the phone to call her friend. The clip ends on a "to be continued" cliffhanger.

    McBryde said the idea to present the songs as interconnected stories came from conversations with her manager John Peets and bandmate Chris Harris. "I got out my sketch pad and we wrote down each song from the record and each character," she said. "It looked like a crazy road map. It looked like a child had drawn it."

    "But there it was. A way to connect every song and every video," McBryde added. "I showed it to Peets, and we put it in Reid Long's hands. And the rest is history."

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