Songfacts®:

• "One I Want" is a single from Van Halen III, the album they made with Gary Cherone as lead singer. It's a list song, with Cherone singing about the different varieties of men in this world (salesman, rich man, pizza man...), all of whom have wants and needs.
  
  "'One I Want' I thought was the closest thing to down-the-strike-zone Van Halen," he said in a Songfacts interview. "And I thought lyrically it was fun – that it could sit well with their old catalog."
• Cherone was in a pretty much impossible situation when he joined Van Halen, which had an impenetrable legacy build on their previous lead singers, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. He's best known for fronting the band Extreme, who most people know from their acoustic ballads "More Than Words" and "Hole Hearted." But Extreme is a legit rock band, and Cherone can really sing - he won over a lot of fans at the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute concert at Wembley Stadium.
  
  Cherone is also a talented lyricist, but he was thrown into the songwriting right away in Van Halen, so he didn't know the guys well enough to connect with them. After they wrote the songs and made the album, they toured and he formed a bond with them, but the next set of songs they wrote were never released as Van Halen took a break in 1999. When the group re-formed, Cherone was out and Hagar was back in.