Songfacts®:

• "One In a Million" is the title track of Aaliyah's second album. Missy Elliott and Timbaland both wrote and produced the majority of the album's material and this was one of the earliest songs that the teenage singer recorded with the pair.
• Missy Elliott recalled to Billboard that she and Timbaland were called in to work on just one song with Aaliyah. However, that one track turned into eight, and the One In a Million album was birthed. The record was Aaliyah's breakthrough and a major milestone in the careers of Missy Elliott and Timbaland. The two songwriters would go to form a special bond with the young R&B starlet.
• Elliott was a rapper, so she wrote "One In A Million" in a rap-singing style as back then she didn't know how to write songs for singers. "I was scared," she admitted. "I don't know if Tim was scared when we first played it because it was a different sound. It was a different way to attack records because people were really singing then; that world of rap-singing didn't really exist."
  
  Elliott added: "Because I wasn't really a singer like that, that's why I wrote like that, because I was a rapper, but I didn't know how to do a bunch of runs, so every record that I would attack, I would attack it like I'm rap-singing it."
  
  However, Aaliyah fell in love with the song as soon as she heard it. Elliot said: "She had an ear and she knew what that music made her feel like. She was next level to understand that this is some next level (music). This is not just the sound that's going on right now - this is a new sound that is being created. This whole movement is new."