One Time

Album: Sway (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • This early Marian Hill song finds their vocalist, Samantha Gongol, letting a playboy type know that she won't be another of his one-and-out conquests. "I'm not the kind of drum you play one time," she purrs.

    The song set the stage for the persona Gongol took on with many of their other songs. "It's one of my favorites," she said in a Songfacts interview. "It's so fun, it's really light and really bold and sassy. I have so much fun performing it."
  • The moody production by Jeremy Lloyd incorporates a saxophone riff from Steve Davit, who often joined the duo in the studio and on stage. Lloyd would often build tracks from Davit's recordings, mixing them with the array of beats and loops on his computer workstation.
  • The first Marian Hill song to get any attention was "Whiskey," which got picked up by various blogs in 2013. "One Time" earned them a bigger following - it was the song they remember people singing along to at their early concerts. The duo got a lot more heat in 2017 when their song "Down" was used in a commercial for Apple AirPods.
  • "One Time" made an impact on Vine in the heyday of the service, which allowed users to post 6-second videos (a precursor to Tik Tok). Most Vines used the opening lines of the song:

    You know you've got that thing
    That makes the girls all swing
  • There is a lot of silence built into this song, which is a hallmark of Jeremy Lloyd's production and something his friend Finneas does with Billie Eilish. For Samantha Gongol, this was an adjustment because it's hard not to fill those silences on stage. "Every time I'm up on stage and there's a pause, it feels like an eternity," she says, adding that her theater background helped her deal with it. "I learned that because of the silence I almost had to over-exaggerate. I had to perform for the back of the room."

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