By the spring of 1988, George Michael was enjoying the kind of American chart run no British male singer had ever put together. His debut solo album Faith was a phenomenon, and its singles were taking turns at the top of the Billboard Hot 100: the title track, then “Father Figure,” each one burnishing a different facet of the same immaculate pop craftsman. Yet the Faith single that may tell you the most about George Michael is the quietest one. “One More Try” is a blue-eyed soul and gospel-pop ballad nearly six minutes long, built on a heartbeat-slow pulse and a vocal that sounds less performed than confessed. Released on 11 April 1988 as the fourth single from Faith, it did something the uptempo hits could not: it topped the pop, R&B and adult contemporary charts simultaneously, and it did so with a song its writer had begun and finished in a single working day.
Written, Recorded and Finished in Eight Hours
The most astonishing production credit on “One More Try” is the clock. Interviewed on the Australian music show Countdown in 1988, Michael revealed that the song was written, recorded and finished in eight hours. That speed matters, because it explains the record’s strange combination of polish and exposure. Michael wrote the song alone, produced it alone and arranged it himself; the Faith personnel around him was deliberately minimal, with Chris Cameron on keyboards and Deon Estus — his old Wham!-era bassist — holding down the low end. There is no choir of session stars, no orchestral swell, no production armour. What there is, instead, is space: a slow, hymn-like keyboard figure, a bassline that moves like a pulse, and one of the most exposed lead vocals Michael ever committed to tape.
That economy was a statement of intent. Faith, released on 30 October 1987, would go on to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and sell in the tens of millions, but its creator was already using the album to argue that he was not merely a pin-up with a gift for hooks. On “One More Try” he stripped the argument down to a single voice in a room, daring the listener to meet him there.
A Gospel Song About Being Afraid
Critics have consistently reached for church language to describe the record. Pitchfork, reviewing Faith in 2018, called “One More Try” a “gospel-pop song that’s faintly baffled by the idea of its own salvation,” while Rolling Stone‘s readers voted it among his five best solo songs, hearing in it the “moody crooner” side of Michael. The lyric explains why the gospel frame fits. The narrator is a young man who has been hurt so often that love itself has become a curriculum of pain: he addresses the lover who wounded him as a “teacher,” and explains that there are things he does not want to learn. He hesitates, he reasons, he nearly walks away — and then, at the very end, temptation wins. In a piece of structural daring almost unheard of in a commercial ballad, Michael withholds the title phrase until the song’s final moments, singing “one more try” only as the narrator finally surrenders. The whole record is the sound of a defence system failing in slow motion.
The gospel influence is not decorative. The pacing, the organ-like keyboard voicings, the call-and-response ache of the backing arrangement and the long, pleading melismas all come from the Black American church and soul tradition Michael had absorbed as a teenager — the tradition of Aretha Franklin, whose own journey from gospel to soul is the template for records like this. It is precisely because the song honours that lineage so completely, rather than borrowing its surface, that American Black radio embraced it, as the charts would soon prove.
Three Charts, One Summit
Radio and the public responded with unusual speed for so slow and lengthy a ballad. “One More Try” debuted at number 40 on the Hot 100 in the week of 16 April 1988 — a strikingly high entry — and climbed to number one in just its seventh week, on 28 May 1988, matching the pace of “Father Figure.” It stayed there for three consecutive weeks, making it the joint second-longest-running American number one of 1988, tied with Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and behind only Steve Winwood’s four-week run with “Roll with It.” In total it spent seven weeks in the top ten, fourteen in the top forty, and finished at number eleven on Billboard‘s year-end Hot 100.
The bigger story was the sweep. “One More Try” also reached number one on the Hot Black Singles chart and on the Adult Contemporary chart — a triple-chart summit that made it Michael’s sixth American number one overall and the third consecutive chart-topper from Faith. Four of the album’s singles would reach number one in the United States, making Michael the only British male solo artist to draw four Hot 100 number ones from a single album; remarkably, none of them topped the chart in his homeland, where “One More Try” peaked at number eight on the UK Singles Chart. It did reach number one in Ireland and Canada, went Gold in the United States and Silver in Britain and France, and its spell atop the Black Singles chart carried a footnote that lasted nearly two decades: it was the last number one on that chart by a white male artist until Robin Thicke’s “Lost Without U” in 2007.
Not everyone was converted. Melody Maker‘s Tony Reed, reviewing the single in April 1988, was openly sniffy about this “very, very sl-o-ow ballad” and its author’s air of wounded luxury — though even Reed conceded it was “apparently quite the crowd pleaser” on Michael’s current world tour. Time has not been kind to the review.
The single itself was a spare artefact, true to the song. Its B-side, “Look at Your Hands,” was a brisker track co-written by Michael with his friend David Austin, and no extended dance remix was needed to sell the A-side: at nearly six minutes, in a market built on three-minute singles, “One More Try” was issued essentially as it stood on the album, its single edit a mere three seconds shorter. Columbia and Epic were, in effect, asking radio to programme a hymn — and radio, on three different formats at once, said yes.
Alone in an Empty Room: The Tony Scott Video
For the video, Michael handed the song to filmmaker Tony Scott, the director of Top Gun, and Scott responded with the opposite of a blockbuster. Filmed at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia — a grand old building that stood empty and derelict at the time — the clip simply watches Michael sing alone in a bare room. Its first shot lasts a little over two minutes, an eternity in the jump-cut grammar of 1988 MTV. A grey-blue light falls through the window, a visual metaphor for loneliness; the furniture stands shrouded in drapes; at one point Michael begins to trace a heart on the steamed glass of a bathroom cabinet and cannot finish it. It is a pop video with the courage of the song itself: nothing happens, and the nothing is the point.
Covered, Honoured, Reborn
“One More Try” became a fixture of Michael’s live work, and its most celebrated concert reading underlined the gospel reading of the song: at the Concert of Hope at Wembley Arena on 1 December 1993, he performed a full live gospel version, later released on the “Jesus to a Child” single in 1996. Two decades on, the song still anchored his stage show, earning a place on Symphonica (2014), the live album recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during his orchestral tour.
Other singers kept testing themselves against it. The American trio Divine took their version to number 29 on the Hot 100 in 1999. British soul singer Beverley Knight covered it in 2011 for her tribute album Soul UK, explaining that this was the song on which Michael “became the real thing” in her mind — that he had channelled a gospel sound which Black America embraced first and the world followed — and Michael publicly thanked her for a version sung, as he put it, beautifully. Mariah Carey recorded the song for her 2014 album Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse. And in 2023, Carrie Underwood performed it at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony honouring Michael — a country superstar, in a hall of rock legends, singing a Greek-Cypriot Londoner’s gospel confession. The song had long since become a standard.
The Quiet Centre of Faith
Faith is usually remembered for its strut: the jukebox, the leather jacket, the stubble, the hooks. But its emotional centre is this slow, frightened, eight-hour ballad, the sound of a 24-year-old songwriter discovering that restraint could hit harder than display. “One More Try” proved that George Michael could top America’s pop, R&B and adult contemporary charts with the same unadorned performance — and it remains the clearest early evidence that beneath the most marketable pop star of his era stood one of its finest soul singers.