Songfacts®:

• This was Kristine W's first #1 Dance hit - she would have 15 more. It was released in 1994, 13 years after she won the Miss Washington pageant. In that time, Kristine established herself as a prime performer, headlining a stage show in Las Vegas with her group Kristine W and the Sting. She also developed her skills as a songwriter and co-wrote all the songs on her first major label album, Land of the Living, released in 1996.
  
  In our full interview with Kristine W, she explained the inspiration for this song: "My stepfather had died and I really was depressed over his sudden death. He was my mentor, really, and one of my heroes. And he died of an aneurysm really suddenly. So that was really feeling his loss. That song just made me think about everything from religion to pollution to the planet. I wove a lot of things that I was feeling into that song. 'Sun rises at 9, it departs at 5 again, ain't doing overtime no more. In this world of color the brightest pictures are plugged right into your wall,' in television, you know, it just seemed like everything on the news was depressing. So when you're depressed it even seems more depressing. I felt like I was numb from the death and I was not living anymore. I was just kind of existing."
• Kristine wrote this song with the production/songwriting team of Rollo Armstrong and Robert Dougan, who also produced the track. She went to London to meet with Armstrong and Dougan, taking quite a leap of faith to do it. "I'd gone to London, I didn't know anybody," she told us, adding, "was really feeling kind of precarious, too, because I wasn't signed with the record label. I leave the States to go across the pond all by myself and work with these songwriters and stay at this hotel and hope that I'm not going to get raped or killed. I really didn't know a lot about the record label and the people behind it. I just had a gut feeling and I kind of rolled with it. They ended up being good people and it was a great project, but at the end of the day you could have found me in the garbage can or something if it would have gone not so good."
• This song charted in the UK twice, first at #33 when it was first released in 1994, then at #40 with a 1997 remix by Peter Ries. Said Kristine: "I was playing to the Las Vegas audience putting myself through school and I come back from London and 'Feel What You Want' blew up over in London, and then it was a big hit over here. And it was really a huge hit in the gay clubs. Because they took that song and that became their mantra. 'Feel what you want it to be, what you want it to feel' became this massive gay anthem, and I didn't even know that it was. So that was a surprise. And it was really a cool surprise, because I got this fan base that was amazingly fun and supportive."