Hey! If you haven’t watched my initial reaction and review of this single, you can do so here.

I had the great pleasure of getting to meet Mario at PentaCon this past weekend and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the person I met. His fun-loving and caring soul made for contagious laughter and smiling all throughout his presence at the event. It is truly inspiring just how genuine and passionate he is with everything he does.

You might think that all of this is great and all but isn’t really relevant to my thoughts on “You Were The One.” But I’d argue the contrary. When listening to the studio recording of this song I couldn’t help but picture Mario Jose performing it (as he did live at PentaCon) and that really elevated this single for me. Had I not gotten to know the person behind these vocals, I doubt I would hold this single in as much high regard. Seeing him perform live showed that he really puts his all into all of his songs even if, like this one, they aren’t specifically about his own life.

I really like Mario’s tone straight out of the gate in this song (which follows up a nice starting instrumental as well). It’s almost raspy in a way, which provides a nice contrast to what is otherwise a very poppy, dare I say “boppy”, song. This tone lays the groundwork for some obvious highlights of the song later on.

He clearly wanted people to have fun when listening to this song. It really exudes that feeling of joy and relief that he conveys in the writing of the song as well, and he adds plenty of dance breaks for people to have fun with. And of course I couldn’t help but picturing his smiley live rendition of it when hearing the studio recording as well. His heart really shines through.

Let’s talk about Mario’s great resolution to this single now. He spends a lot of time establishing the happy tone throughout the first two acts of the song, so his vocals aren’t as in your face as the music and feeling of the song are. But this final act allows him to really build on what he has set up and belt out some great notes which still complement the elated tone of the song but also show that he’s not just going for some generic pop jam. Almost the entire song is justified by those last 20 seconds. If he had belted out like that in the first chorus of the song, the whole thing easily could have fell apart (especially when he has to perform it in a live venue), so this resolution was crucial to the structure of the song.

Thanks for reading what I had to say. You’re a real trooper if you made it this far.

Singsingsingsingsingsingsingsingsingsing!