Songfacts®:

• Unlike many of Jackson's sexually charged songs, this one is about waiting for the right moment to consummate a relationship. It's a ballad that contrasts the funk/dance songs on her breakthrough album, Control.
• Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who were the architects behind the beats of Control, wrote this song with Jackson and her good friend Melanie Andrews. Jam remembers sitting down at the piano to compose this song: "I didn't think at the time we were sending out any kind of significant message," he said. "For us it was more like a love song. It got interpreted as maybe more of a statement than it was intended to be. It's a very simple love song and it was just saying, 'Let's wait. I'm not going anywhere, so let's just take our time.' Lyrically, that was Janet's concept and we shaped the music to fit."
  
  For some teachers, the meaning was about abstaining from sex and they used the song to show their students it was okay to say no - and that's fine with Jam. "Sometimes music reaches a broader meaning and it's fantastic to be associated with something like that," he said.
• Jackson was through with waiting by the time her next album, Rhythm Nation 1814, was released in 1989. The hot track "Someday Is Tonight" was the sequel to this song.
• "Let's Wait Awhile" was a pertinent song in the midst of the AIDS crisis; when it was released in 1986, there was no treatment for the disease. The message to be selective and patient with lovemaking was prudent.
• According to Jackson, so song's message didn't always get across. "A lot of people didn't really pick up on what 'Let's Wait Awhile' was saying," she wrote in her Rhythm Nation tour book. "It was about a girl who wanted to take it slow, to be safe and wait until she and the guy really get to know each other. When she can believe that their love is for real and that he really means what he is saying."
• "Let's Wait Awhile" was the fifth single from the Control album, and like the previous four, it was a big hit, going to #2 in the US. All five of those singles reached the Top 5, with "When I Think of You" hitting #1. The sixth single was "The Pleasure Principle," which came in at #14.