Songfacts®:

• This was Savage Garden's breakout hit, and it was a big one. It's about a guy who is so taken with a beautiful woman, he has to take a chance by approaching her, even though she seems to have a reputation. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mike - Santa Barbara, CA
• Savage Garden was an Australian pop-rock duo made up of singer Darren Hayes and guitarist/keyboardist Daniel Jones. They released two hit albums before calling it quits in 2001.
• The duo originally released this through Roadshow Music, a small Australian record label, but its success started a buzz with major labels that were looking to capitalize on the resurgence of pop music on the radio. They signed with the Sony-owned Columbia Records and issued their debut album, which also featured their signature hit, "Truly Madly Deeply."
• Hayes publicly came out as gay in the early 2000s but was married to a woman and struggling with his sexuality when he was writing the duo's debut album. When asked if any of the songs in Savage Garden's catalog contained any coded gay messages, the singer told Billboard: "'I Want You' is a song about a dream about being in love with a male energy, and waking up and feeling sad that I knew there was a part of me that was missing."
• Hayes told Apple Music more about the dream that inspired the song. "I have such a soft spot for this song and it just keeps coming back," he said. "It's based on a dream that I had where I fell in love with a boy. And when I woke up, I missed him. I didn't know how I would ever feel that feeling again. I had this almost beautiful melancholy, romantic grief. I remembered everything about this boy who I'd never met. The smell, the kiss, the feeling, the butterflies in my tummy, all that stuff. And so I spent about a week mourning that feeling. I used to think, 'Maybe if I go to sleep, I'll see him again.'"
• This was used on Supernatural in the 2020 episode "Destiny's Child." It was also used as the ending theme to season 3 of the animated series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
• The Nigel Dick-directed music video finds Savage Garden in a futuristic warehouse where they're recording the song. Hayes' face is projected onto a giant screen while he sings. Meanwhile, a redheaded woman watches the video in another room and temporarily gets sucked into the TV.
• In a track-by-track interview for the 2015 compilation album The Singles, Hayes recalled how the rapid-fire tune came together. He said: "It is a nonsensical song... it's a song that lyrically, really my voice is like a bass instrument in that song. It's just stuttering along like a rhythm instrument and so the symbols will come first and the lyrics were something that I did pour through a thesaurus and I did look through my dictionary. I thought of as many colorful, fantastic adjectives and analogies that I could use to describe this thing."
• According to Jones, the fast-paced tempo made it easier for Hayes to sing because he didn't have to hold his breath so long. "The fact that he was pushing it to go faster 'cause it made it easier for him, it's all part of the particular magic of that song," he explained.
• When Hayes was having trouble coming up with a chorus, Jones encouraged him to keep it simple, which is how the "I want you," lyric came about. The complexity came from the layer of vocals that amplified the refrain." The recording process really brought the song alive," Jones explained in an early promo interview. "The simple vocal in the chorus became a bed of 12 voices. Six of Darren's and six of session singers that we sank very low in the mix to give the chorus the thick layer of vocals that you hear."