One In A Million

Album: Songs For Christmas (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this Yuletide love tune, Canadian country singer Tenille Townes wants to watch the snow falling on Christmas Eve with her partner, whom she compares to an intricate snowflake because they're both "one a million." Instead of trying to write a contemporary-sounding Christmas song, Townes and her co-writer, Daniel Tashian, wanted to emulate the jazzy feel of the classics.

    Townes told Entertainment Focus about the song in 2019: "It's like, 'What if we could step back in time into these beautiful classic feeling melodies that Christmas songs always have and what if we can make up our own?' It was really fun. It's a different stylistic way of writing, picking more of those jazzier chords and like, 'OK, how could we get to tell like a snowy, enchanting story?'"
  • Most Christmas songs are written months before the actual holiday so they're ready to go for the season (Mel Torme and Robert Wells' vision of chestnuts roasting on an open fire came on a sweltering hot summer's day for "The Christmas Song," which Townes also covered on her holiday release) and this one is no different. She and Tashian were on a songwriting retreat at the beach when they suddenly started talking about snowflakes. They brought the idea back to Nashville, where they finished writing the tune in time for her 2020 Songs For Christmas EP.
  • This was featured in the opening scene of the 2022 Hallmark Movies & Mysteries original Time For Him To Come Home For Christmas. Townes also made her acting debut in the movie, but she didn't have to dig too deep to get into character: She played a singer named Tenille Townes. While she never imagined acting in a movie, it was a lifelong dream to get one of her songs on a soundtrack. She told Songfacts in a 2023 interview:

    "I had that on my vision board for a while - have my Christmas song be in a Hallmark movie, or be a part of writing songs in a film one day. We went to watch it the night that it came out and it started the opening scene with that song. I just lost it."
  • Townes was signed to Columbia Nashville in 2018, the same year she released her breakthrough single, "Somebody's Daughter," which went to #1 on the Canadian Country chart. The song teased her major-label debut, The Lemonade Stand, which was named Country Album of the Year at the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Awards in 2021.

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