One Of Us - Short Version

This was written by Eric Bazilian, who was working on the album with Rob Hyman and Rick Chertoff. He told Songfacts: "For me, the song was more about what happens to you when you look at something that has completely changed your world view, which could be meeting God, it could be meeting an alien, it could be a near-death experience, it could be anything like that. Just how everything you know is wrong, or everything you know is right, and you didn't know it."

Hyman and Bazilian were members of The Hooters and along with Chertoff, collaborated on Cyndi Lauper's first album, She's So Unusual. They usually take a while to craft their songs, but occasionally one will come out quickly. One of these songs was "All You Zombies," which was The Hooters' first single and also contains lots of biblical imagery. Says Bazilian, "I've written a decent number of 'God' songs, and I wrote a bunch of them after 'One Of Us,' except you'll never hear them because they're not as good. It's a strange thing. I could, and I often have, pointed to another hand guiding."

Eric Bazilian explained how "One Of Us" came together in his Songfacts interview: "It was January, 1994. My now-wife had just moved over from Sweden. We were watching The Making of Sgt. Pepper on TV, and when it ended, she expressed interest in the 4-track recording process - that documentary is mostly George Martin sitting at the Abbey Road 4-track console. I pointed at the mass of wires sitting on my dining room table, which was my porta-studio, and said, 'There you go, that's 4-track recording technology for you.' She asked me to record something, and that's when it happened. I had been playing the guitar riff all day and put a little track together. She said, 'Sing it,' and I said, 'You can't just sing, you have to write the song, you have to discuss the concept, you have to re-write then decide you were better in the first place.' Something snapped - I just put the thing in record and started singing and that's what came out. The verses came out in the first pass, the chorus came out in the second pass. The next day I went in. We took a break later in the afternoon and I decided to play it for everybody. I had no agenda, I just said, 'Hey, check out this weird song I wrote last night.' I played the recording I'd done, and Rick Chertoff looked up and said, 'Joan, do you think you could sing that?' She said, 'Yeah,' so I wrote the words out and played on the guitar as she sang it, and that was it. That was our first rough demo of it."