Songfacts®:

• This is the title title track of British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi's sophomore album. According to Calvi, 'One Breath' signifies, "the moment before you've got to open yourself up, and how terrifying that is."
  
  She added: "It's scary and it's thrilling. It's also full of hope, because whatever has to happen hasn't happened yet."
• Calvi explained to NME the song is, "about that moment before saying something that's going to change everything forever, and the time it takes to leave that one breath before you do so. The song ends before I say whatever it is, so the listener can make up their own mind."
• A family member died during the period when Calvi was writing the album. She told Mojo magazine: "I can hear a sense of me trying to fight the feeling of losing control, of being on the edge of something. It's terrifying, but that's what life feels like when you lose someone. That's what the title track's about, which sums up my interest in music, the idea that the music is as much a story as the lyric."
• The song deals with the theme of momentous life changes. "I wanted to play with the idea of time," Calvi explained to The Independent. "'One Breath' is about that one breath before something happens. You know when something really momentous happens in your life, time feels like it's lasting longer than it really is? The whole song was drawn out to really express the emotional turmoil of how scary and how thrilling it is to be at the moment before everything is going to change in your life."