When Amerie’s 1 Thing crashed onto the radio back in January 2005, it felt like it was doing it almost literally. The clattering drum opening - lifted from The Meters’ 1969 song, Oh, Calcutta - sounds like someone trying to batter down a door.
1 Thing was produced and co-written by Rich Harrison who, in 2003, had helped Beyoncé to create Crazy In Love, her breakthrough solo hit. There are certainly similarities between the two songs: both are heavily percussive and powered by a sampled vintage funk loop (Crazy In Love samples The Chi-Lites' Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So))
Indeed, there has been speculation that Crazy In Love was originally intended for Amerie before Beyoncé stepped in and made it hers, but speaking on The Joe Budden Podcast earlier this year, the star confirmed that this wasn’t the case.
“I didn’t hear anything about it, but a lot of people would be like, ‘Wait, that’s not your record? Why didn’t he give that record to you?’”Amerie said. “And I’m like, he never, he never played that record for me.”
While 1 Thing didn’t have quite the impact that Crazy In Love did, it was certainly a huge success, reaching Top 10s around the world.
“There’s a certain kind of common thread that he has in his percussion and his production,” Amerie recently told Billboard when discussing Harrison’s work on 1 Thing, “but I will say when I first heard it, it was a little like, ‘OK.’ It was that moment when I was like, ‘All right. I’m gonna sing over this. ‘Kay.’”
Harrison, though, knew what he was doing - particularly with that crucial Oh, Calcutta sample. “The original sample, you can feel the vibe there, but the way he flipped it is what really made it feel go-go,” says Amerie.
But Columbia Records - Amerie’s label at the time - weren’t convinced. On hearing the record, they fed back that the song needed a bigger chorus hook.
Amerie and Harrison, though, knew that they were onto something, so leaked the song to radio in a bid to secure an official release. The story goes that Columbia tried to put the genie back in the bottle, but the track was receiving such great fan feedback that the stations refused to pull it.
“I think they were playing catch-up,” says Amerie of her label’s reaction. “I didn’t have an ‘a-ha’ moment [when she realised that the record was a hit], because everything was moving too fast. For me, it was, ‘How do we catch up?’ The label was on board and I’m glad it worked out.”
It certainly did, but what of the rumour that another reason why Columbia might not have wanted to release the record was that Jennifer Lopez had expressed an interest in recording it?
“I don’t know that for a fact, because I didn’t know if it was her who wanted the record or people working with her that wanted the record for her,” Amerie tells Billboard, diplomatically. “So I don’t know that.”
What we do know is that Lopez would go on to release Get Right - another Harrison production, and another song that’s built around a classic funk sample (this time taken from Maceo & The Macks’ Soul Power 74). There’s a bit of a story to this one, too: the beat from Get Right had previously been used in Ride, a song that Harrison had been working on with Usher but which didn’t make it onto his 2004 album, Confessions.
1 Thing, though, is arguably superior to both Usher and Lopez’s records; despite going on to release several more acclaimed albums after 2005’s Touch, on which 1 Thing was featured (2007’s Because I Love It was particularly well-received and should have been a bigger record than it was), Amerie never topped its impact.
She has recently made a return to the spotlight, though, with a Tiny Desk Concert in the bag and reports of a new album being on the way. And 20 years on from 1 Thing, she’s proud of what she achieved with Harrison.
“Rich and I really did create a sound,” she says. “When we came together, we really did create something new.”
