The One

Album: Coming Up For Air (2015)
Charted: 27
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Songfacts®:

  • This anthemic tune was written the night before Kodaline engineer Phil Magee's wedding, and performed for the first time at the ceremony. "There were only 100 people there but it was scarier than playing Glastonbury," vocalist Stephen Garrigan told Q magazine.
  • Garrigan wrote the song for the happy couple as a last minute wedding present. "Like an idiot, I left writing it until the night before," he recalled.
  • Other songs originally written as wedding presents, which became successful releases in their own right include "The Day Before You" by Rascal Flatts and "Love Song" by The Cure.
  • Kodaline hadn't planned to record this for their Coming Up For Air album. During a gig in Toronto, a fan proposed to his fiancée onstage. She said yes, so Kodaline played Phil Magee's wedding song to mark the occasion. Some fans at that Toronto concert recorded their own version of the song and put it up on YouTube. Kodaline were so pleased with it, they decided to record the tune. Garrigan told Radio.com: "It's weird that it took somebody covering our own song to actually make us think about recording it and putting it on the album. That was definitely a first."

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