How Opshop almost lost One Day

Each week we talk to an artist about their best-known work. This week Opshop frontman Jason Kerrison tells us how One Day literally might have never been.

I thought, who is an artist that I've admired my whole life in terms of their song writing? Who could I invoke?

‘Iremember when we were writing the material for Second Hand Planet, the second Opshop album. The producer was making his way through the songs that we had and said to us just before we were about to head over to play with the Manic Street Preachers in Japan, ‘you guys don’t have enough for an album, sort your s... out, find a couple more songs’.

‘‘I thought f..., obviously he doesn’t have confidence in us and probably we need to work that out.

‘‘So we went back home, started going through a whole bunch of rubbish and found, literally in the rubbish, a couple of songs. One of them was Maybe and one of them was One Day. At the time I wrote it, it was literally just a purge of thoughts.

‘‘My girlfriend at the time and I had had a real barney. She didn’t like the fact that I had been away on tour and what that might have meant to her. She protested at that and I decided to turn that into a song.

‘‘And so, I thought, well, it’s an opportunity to also use a technique that I’d learnt from Paul McCartney on the way home driving back from a gig in Tauranga. I was listening to Radio New Zealand and McCartney was in an interview talking about how he wrote Let It Be.

‘‘In Paul McCartney’s words, it was him evoking the spirit of Ray Charles and then trying to write a song from that space, which I thought was interesting because Ray Charles hadn’t passed away at that point.

‘‘So I thought OK, well, I’m going to try to use that technique to write a song. I thought, who is an artist that I’ve admired my whole life in terms of their song writing? Who could I invoke?

‘‘I thought, growing up in Invercargill, The Eagles were the staple of the music I listened to and I was a massive fan of their songwriting.

‘‘So I tried to write a song like Don Henley, a song where I was pretending I was Don Henley singing it and everything. And that’s essentially how One Day came about.’’ – As told to Dani McDonald.