“One True Love” is David Cassidy choosing grace over glamour—closing a late-career album with a gospel-lit promise that even after loss and confusion, the heart can still find its way back.
“One True Love” appears as track 10—the final track—on David Cassidy’s 1992 studio album Didn’t You Used to Be…, released in September 1992 on Scotti Bros. and produced by Eric “E.T.” Thorngren. It’s credited to David Cassidy and Sue Shifrin, and the printed timing in the album’s track listing is 4:35 (some digital services display a slightly different runtime, around 4:33, which is common when masters are reissued or indexed differently). In chart terms, there’s no triumphant “debut position” to report: the album is listed in standard discography tables as a release that did not chart in the major territories summarized there.
And strangely, that absence suits the song.
Because “One True Love” doesn’t sound like it wants to compete. It sounds like it wants to confess—and to bless. The album was recorded February–June 1992 at Santa Monica Sound Recorders, and you can almost hear that environment: the controlled calm of a professional room, the sense of a performer trying to tell the truth without raising his voice. Cassidy is credited not only with lead vocals but also with guitar and backing vocals across the project, reinforcing that this wasn’t just a “vocal job.” It was a personal stake in the work.
The real story-behind-the-song detail—the one that turns the track from “closing number” into a statement—lies in the personnel list: The First A.M.E. Church is credited as choir on “One True Love,” with Joe Westmoreland named as choirmaster. That’s not decoration. A choir changes the emotional physics of a recording. It widens the room. It makes a private worry feel like something survivable, shared, carried. Where ordinary backing vocals can flatter a lead, a choir can hold a lead—like hands under the arms when the knees start to tremble.
So the meaning of “One True Love” becomes clearer the more you sit with its placement and its sound. This is the last word of a record described as being largely written or co-written by Cassidy’s wife and creative partner Sue Shifrin—a collaboration that gives the album a diary-like continuity, the feeling that the songs belong to one long conversation rather than ten separate performances. By the time we reach the end, Cassidy isn’t trying to recreate teenage fever or radio polish. He’s asking for something harder: certainty that doesn’t depend on applause.
Even the fragments of lyric that circulate in official song listings and lyric databases point toward that road-worn hope. The song opens with the image of travel and difficulty—“Some roads are long / Some roads are hard”—before turning toward a simple vow to keep searching for the real thing. It’s a deceptively plain idea, but it carries weight because it’s spoken from the far side of experience. Not “love will save me,” not “love will fix everything,” but: I will keep believing in the possibility of a love that’s true. That’s a mature kind of faith—less fireworks, more lamp-light.
There’s also a quiet poignancy in how the record’s documented details don’t quite line up in the modern digital world. The original release is widely cited as September 1992, while some streaming metadata lists November 1, 1992 as the date attached to the album. It’s a small discrepancy, yet it echoes the song’s theme: life gets re-filed, re-dated, re-framed; what matters is what remains true underneath the paperwork. “One True Love” remains true in its intention—ending not with bitterness, but with an upward-facing chorus of voices.
That’s why the track lingers. It doesn’t “close” the album so much as it releases it—like a final exhale after an honest talk. David Cassidy, so often remembered for the bright surface of early fame, leaves this record—and this last song—looking for the deeper thing: a love that doesn’t vanish when the room gets quiet, a love that doesn’t depend on being young, a love steady enough to be sung alongside a choir.
And if you listen to it that way, the title stops sounding like a fairy tale. It starts sounding like a decision.