Songfacts®:

• In this ballad, an old flame returns to Janet Jackson's life, and she finds herself falling in love with him again. It's not necessarily a good thing: She wants to be over him by finds herself drawn back in.
  
  Jackson wrote the song with her producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. It was released as the third single from her self-titled fifth album, following "That's The Way Love Goes" and "If." It was her seventh #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, spending two weeks on top of the chart.
  
  Jimmy Jam told Songfacts that Jackson was very receptive to their musical ideas, which were all over the map. She would be happy to work on dance or funk songs, often with samples they would introduce to her, "and then sit down at a piano and do something simple like 'Again.'"
• "Again" is the closing song from the film Poetic Justice, released in 1993 about two months after the janet. album came out. Jackson stars in the movie opposite Tupac; it was her first movie role (when she was younger she appeared on the sitcoms Good Times and Diff'rent Strokes).
  
  The song received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song but was beaten by Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia."
• Jackson also released a French version of the song, which was included on the CD single.
• "Again" was sampled by the Virgin Island R&B singer Iyaz on his 2010 hit "Solo."
• Jimmy Jam played the piano while Jackson performed this song at the 1994 Academy Awards ceremony and, he admitted, he was struck with stage fright. He said: "It was a little bit scary because the orchestra was beautiful. Bill Conti was the conductor. But I hadn't played the song in about a year and a half. I'm sitting at the piano and there is a serious 80-piece orchestra of the best people and I'm thinking, 'I don't remember this song.' It was the weirdest thing, but somehow we got through it, and what a great experience!" Movie fans will also recognize Conti as the composer of "Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky)" and other music from the Rocky series.
• Janet's love interest in the video is played by Gary Dourdan, who later starred in the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as Warrick Brown.