Songfacts®:

• Nashville singer-songwriter Jamie Floyd, Peter Sallis and Phillip LaRue penned this tune, which was inspired by the hurt Floyd felt having just come out of a relationship. She told The Boot, "Pete said to me, 'Jamie, you don't need to be so upset because in reality, if you really think about it, it only ever really works out once.' I love writing sad songs. I love digging in and going to that dark place. To purge myself of all that hurt, I was like, 'We gotta write a song about how it only happens once. We gotta call it 'Once.'"
• Floyd and Sallis are songwriting partners but they'd never written with LaRue before. They set up a writing session but found themselves not getting anywhere. Floyd recalled to The Boot: "I had given them a line to maybe go with the song we were writing: 'You were a wait so worth the price of all the hurt.' It could go either way. It wasn't exactly happy, but it wasn't sad either.
  Pete's like, 'Why don't we try the 'Once' idea?' So, we tell Phillip about how the odds are that it only works out once, so when you fail, those were your odds anyway. Pete suggested that we use the line from earlier as the first line, and I was sold on that. But then he was like, 'Let's make it happy. Let's talk about the one time you do find it and how you have to make the most of it and give it everything you have.'"
  With Sallis and Floyd scrapping over the lyrics whilst La Rue penned the melody, the song gradually evolved. Said Floyd: "We were talking it out, step by step, and it was like when you find that with someone, nothing else matters anymore and you have to run with it. We compromised on a lot of it. You'll hear the lines like, 'You were a wait so worth the price of all the hurt inside me,' which sounds a little deeper than the rest of the song - it's a little lighter and more optimistic like the next line, 'just when the sun was setting on my heart.'"
  It's always my intention that if makes me feel something, I feel like it will make a listener feel something. A lot of the fight that we had was over that. It's funny that the song talks about let's fight for this and, ironically, we fought for it!"