Songfacts®:

• The lead single from What If Nothing, this upbeat song tells a story of moving forward in uncertain circumstances:
  
  Cross my heart and hope to die
  Taking this one step at a time
  Got your back if you got mine
  One foot in front of the other
  
  Vocalist Nick Petricca noted to Rolling Stone that the song's lyrics are thematically appropriate to where Walk the Moon is at in 2017: "'One Foot' really sums up the theme of the whole record: Staring out into the unknown, being faced with uncertainty and what could be certain failure, but deciding to move forward and take that first step anyway," he explained. "The song is partly inspired by the journey that I've been through just in my love life, but it's mirrored with the relationship with my band members and just that we've decided to keep moving forward in the face of the unknown."
• The song's music video was methodically planned to coincide exactly with the Great American Eclipse of 2017. It was directed by Robert Hales (Nine Inch Nails, Death Cab For Cutie, Imagine Dragons, Stone Temple Pilots) and filmed in Joshua Tree National Park with special camera lenses similar to the ones people wore to watch the eclipse.
• After many months of touring behind their 2014 album Talking Is Hard, Walk the Moon was exhausted, both mentally and physically. The band took some time out for the first time in years during the summer of 2016, but were unsure what would happen when they reconvened.
  
  "We had a lot of reasons that we needed to just chill for awhile," bassist Kevin Ray tells told ABC Radio. "Coming back into it, we didn't really know what was gonna happen. We were kind of faced with a big uncertainty, and potentially a new beginning for us -- kind of shedding an old skin, if you will."
  
  "[We] realized that no matter what, we were gonna press on and keep going and move forward anyways, and we just had to dig deep," he continued. "That's what ['One Foot'] is about. It comes from knowing that we have to put one foot in front of the other and just keep moving on."