Getting Your Head Around Not The Only One
Not The Only One came out in 2014 as the lead single from Sam Smith's debut album, In The Lonely Hour. It was written by Sam Smith, Jimmy Napes, and Charlie Stephens. The track topped charts across Europe and became one of those songs that everyone seemed to know the words to, even if they couldn't sing it themselves. The song is built around a simple chord progression in B minor, with a tempo of about 82 beats per minute. That slow, plodding pace is deliberate. It gives the vocal room to breathe and drag slightly behind the beat, which is where Smith gets a lot of the emotional weight. Try playing along at full speed and it falls apart. Slow it down and the chords start making sense.
Sam Smith Song Not The Only One - What You Need To Know
There's a common misunderstanding about this track that I ran into when I was first trying to arrange it for a small jazz trio. People assume the verse chords are straightforward because they sound simple on the recording. They're not. The piano part uses suspended chords and passing tones that create a lot of harmonic ambiguity, especially in the pre-chorus leading into "You say that we're just friends." I spent probably four hours trying to figure out the exact voicings by ear before I realized I should just look at the official sheet music. The guitar tab versions floating around online are mostly wrong. They simplify the harmony to basic triads and lose the whole color of the original. If you're trying to sound like the record, you need the sus2 and add9 voicings on the piano parts. The guitar doesn't play much original harmony anyway, it mostly doubles the vocal line. Another thing nobody warns you about: the bridge is in a completely different key center than the verse and chorus. It modulates up to D major briefly before dropping back down. If you're doing a cover and you keep everything in B minor, it sounds flat and lifeless. That brief lift into D is the whole point of the song's emotional arc. Miss it and you've missed the song.
The vocal range sits roughly between A3 and E5, which is manageable for most tenors but tricky if you're trying to stay in your comfortable middle voice. Smith uses a lot of falsetto in the chorus, particularly on the title line. You don't have to hit every note in falsetto, but if you belt the whole thing it loses the vulnerability that makes the song work. That's the thing people get wrong most often. They sing it like a power ballad when it's actually a quiet song about something painful. If you want the official single, it's available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. The audio runs about three minutes and fifty seconds. Streaming royalties for a track this old are tiny, so if you're genuinely interested in supporting the artists, buying the album or the single directly is the only thing that actually moves the needle. I'd also mention that the live versions on BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge and the One Night Only concert special are worth listening to if you want to hear how the song translates acoustically. The piano-only arrangements strip away the production sheen and expose exactly how strong the melody is on its own. That's usually the version that convinces people this was always going to be a standards-level song, not just a pop hit.
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