One night in January 1994, Eric Bazilian was sitting in his Philadelphia home with his girlfriend Sarah, who he had met when his band The Hooters played two festivals in Sweden. The pair were watching The Making Of Sgt Pepper on TV.
“That documentary is mostly George Martin sitting at the Abbey Road four-track console,” said Bazilian in an interview with Songfacts. “I pointed at the mass of wires sitting on my dining room table, which was my Portastudio, and said, ‘There you go, that's four-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.”
The track that Bazilian created in that moment was One Of Us, which would be recorded by Kentucky-born singer-songwriter Joan Osborne and released in November 1995.
It was a massive global hit, an enthralling and infectiously catchy song with witty and insightful lyrics that place God in the context of the fallible and the everyday: “What if God was one of us/Just a slob like one of us?”.
30 years on from its release, One Of Us remains a compelling alt-rock classic.
Eric Bazilian rose to prominence after co-founding The Hooters in 1980 with friend and fellow musician and songwriter Rob Hyman. The band’s distinct sound melded rock, reggae, ska and folk and by the mid-’80s they were enjoying major mainstream success, with the song Satellite a hit in the UK in 1987.
On the day that Bazilian came up with One Of Us, he and Hyman were in the middle of writing songs for Kentucky-born singer Joan Osborne’s debut major label album, after being recruited by producer and label boss Rick Chertoff.
That morning, Bazilian picked up Hyman’s Gibson ES-330 and started playing around with the hypnotic arpeggiated guitar figure that he would record later that day on his Portastudio..
Like many great songs, it’s deceptively simple, a cyclical chord sequence of F#m-D-A-E that forms the basis of the verse and chorus and which only varies when it drops to D-A-E on the pre-chorus.
As Bazilian began to write the lyrics, he had in mind the deep baritone voice of Brad Roberts from Canadian band the Crash Test Dummies.
In an interview with Songfacts, Bazilian said he conceived of One Of Us as being “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.”
Despite the references to God, Bazilian said he wasn't trying to advocate any specific religious belief when he wrote this song.
“There was no conscious decision to write a song with the 'G' word in it,” he told Songfacts, “but it ended up sort of summing up my world view inadvertently, just by the words that happened to pour out of me at the time.”
When it came to one of the song’s most memorable lines “just a slob like one of us”, Bazilian told Dave Simpson of The Guardian that he did not mean it literally. “I’ve had to explain many times that I’m not calling God a slob, and that it’s really a song about human beings”.
Bazilian recalled that “the lyrics just tumbled out” although he had problems finishing one line in particular. His girlfriend Sarah had fallen asleep but when she woke she had a suggestion.
“I struggled with one line, after ‘What if God was … a stranger on the bus?’. I had ‘… in the dust’. Then Sarah woke up and suggested… ‘trying to make his way home’. It was perfect.”
By this point, Bazilian and Hyman were deeply entrenched in writing songs for Joan Osborne’s album, which would be entitled Relish.
Osborne had moved from the suburbs of Louisville in her native Kentucky to New York City in the late ’80s to study filmmaking at New York University.
One evening, by chance, she sang at an open mic night at the Abilene Cafe in the East Village. Other musicians encouraged her to return and she was soon immersed in New York City’s live music scene, forming a band and playing alongside artists such as the Spin Doctors and Jeff Buckley.
In 1991, she formed her own record label, Womanly Hips, and recorded her first full-length album, Soul Show: Live At Delta 88, which featured a version of the classic Son Of A Preacher Man.
Osborne built up a devoted following, and was performing at a club in Philadelphia when a chance encounter led to a major opportunity.
“Rob Hyman from The Hooters came to my show at a club in Philadelphia and said: ‘You’re amazing’,” Osborne recalled in an interview with The Guardian in June 2024. “He told me his friend Rick Chertoff, a producer and the boss of the Blue Gorilla label, was looking for artists and said, ‘I think he’d love you’.
“At that point in my career, I’d heard a lot of stuff from guys in bars at the end of the night, but I got Rick’s number. He was very thoughtful and suggested putting me together with Rob and Eric from The Hooters.”
Chertoff was impressed by Osborne’s talent and signed her to Blue Gorilla, an imprint of Mercury Records. They wasted no time in starting work on her album.
The day after writing One Of Us, Bazillian headed over to Hyman’s studio as usual to continue work on Osborne’s record. He was already convinced that the deep baritone timbre of Brad Roberts from the Crash Test Dummies would be ideally suited to One Of Us. But he was enthused enough that day to play the song to Osborne, Hyman and Chertoff.
Osborne told The Guardian in 2024. “We were working in this little crawl-space studio that Rob had above his garage in Philly when Eric played us a demo of One Of Us, which he was intending to send to the Crash Test Dummies. Rick immediately said, ‘No, you’re going to give that song to Joan’. He was very insistent.
“The chorus reminded me of the sort of question a kid might ask a parent: ‘What if God was one of us?’ So when I sang it I played up that kind of innocence.”
Osborne, who had grown up in the heart of the Bible belt, was cautious about singing lyrics that might be deemed sacrilegious. “I remember asking if there was another way of expressing whether God was ‘just a slob like one of us’,” she said, “but Rick insisted that line would grab people’s attention.”
In an interview with Joe Bosso of Guitar Player magazine in March 2025, Bazillian recalled Rick Chertoff’s reaction to the song. “Rick could tell I had something. He looked at Joan and said, ‘Do you think you can sing that?’ It was almost like a dare.”
Osborne reportedly replied, “I can sing the phone book” before taking a pass at singing over the demo. By the time she finished it was evident to everyone in the room that they had something really special.
“I immediately started writing my Grammy speech,” joked Bazilian.
On the recording of One Of Us, Bazilian played guitar and electric piano, while Rob Hyman played drums and mellotron. Both sang backing vocals.
There’s an endearing simplicity to the performance and arrangement throughout.
At the time Osborne had just discovered a field recording of a Kentucky singer called Nell Hampton, performing a variation of the 1928 John S. McConnell hymn Heavenly Aeroplane.
Rick Chertoff suggested introducing the song with a snippet of Hampton’s singing. From there, Bazilian’s guitar intro glides into life, just a sparse chord sequence against the simplest of hi-hats and a lead line that heralds the top-line vocal hook.
For the lead guitar and the solo, Bazilian used his 1954 Gibson Gold Top Les Paul.
38 seconds in, the whole thing stops before the bass, drums and creamy overdriven guitar pile in. It’s loose, lithe and with a carefree sleepwalk-like feel throughout.
Osborne’s voice has a deep, rich timbre and the close-to-the-mic nuances of her phrasing bring a real resonance to the track.
“Her delivery was perfect,” Bazilian told Dave Simpson of The Guardian, “because she asks the question in such a wide-eyed way but has the voice of experience. So it’s a grown-up voice with a child’s imagination.”
One Of Us was released on 21 November 1995 and reached No.1 in Australia, Belgium, Canada and Sweden, while peaking at No.2 in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland and Norway.
The song reached No. 4 in the Billboard Hot 100 and No.6 in the UK Singles Chart.
It was an astonishing performance for an artist who had seemingly come from nowhere, and the song yielded multiple Grammys.
Alan Jones from Music Week noted that “Joan Osborne has come up with a delicious debut single One Of Us, an electrically charged and retro-styled song with an intimate vocal”, while Roch Parisien from AllMusic described One Of Us as “a simple, direct statement of faith, honest and unadorned, one framed in a near-perfect chorus and delectable Neil Young-ish guitar riff”.
As the song ascended charts across the globe, it seemed at first as though Joan Osborne’s concerns about the lyrical content may have been justified.
“I was getting death threats and people were picketing my concerts,” Osborne told The Guardian. “Thankfully that was a fleeting thing.”
A year after One Of Us was a hit for Osborne, a new version of the song came from an unlikely source – Prince.
The triple-album Emancipation was the first by Prince to feature songs composed by writers other than himself.
He covered One Of Us along with I Can't Make You Love Me (a 1991 hit for Bonnie Raitt), La-La (Means I Love You) (a 1967 single by the Delfonics) and Betcha By Golly, Wow! (a hit for the Stylistics in 1972).
Prince's version of One Of Us is mostly faithful to the original, although he changed that contentious lyric to "What if God was one of us/Just a slave like one of us..."
For Eric Bazilian, the memory of Osborne recording the song is still fresh in his mind.
As he recalled to The Guardian: “When we’d finished recording it, we all looked round the room. I had the same feeling that I had when Rob and Cyndi Lauper played their first draft of Time After Time. I knew that we were going to be hearing this for the rest of our lives.”
It’s a sentiment echoed in an interview he gave about One Of Us with GuitarPlayer in March 2025. “Even after 30 years,” he said, “it’s still brand new and alive for me.”
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