Songfacts®:

• In this song, Mandy Moore is filled with desire, looking to get with a guy even if it's only for one night. The lyric is pretty suggestive, with lines that could come from a romance novel:
  
  Your breath on my face
  Your warm gentle kiss I taste
  
  She was just 16 at the time, so we'll assume that kissing and cuddling is what she has in mind for the evening.
• Mandy Moore used a mulch of songwriters and producers on her I Wanna Be With You album. The title track was written by Tiffany Arbuckle and Keith Thomas (also the producer), but when producers of the movie Center Stage expressed interest in the song, Shelly Peiken, who had co-written the Christina Aguilera #1 hit "What a Girl Wants," was brought in to "song doctor" it to make it more appropriate for the film.
  
  "I took it and I loved the feel of it," Peiken told Songfacts. "It was just delicious. As soon as I heard it I wanted to write to it. My daughter Layla was a baby at the time, and she was napping, so I put my headphones on and I just paced and paced around in my backyard while she slept and I had the monitor close by. I wrote most of the words - Tiffany wrote some - and they loved it. And Mandy just sounded so beautiful and sweet singing it."
• Moore was one of the teen stars of the late '90s and early '00s who built a solid fanbase and got some airplay on MTV, but never came close to the renown of peers like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Her debut album was released in 1999 when she was 15; "I Wanna Be With You" was the title track to her next album, which came out when she was 16. The song went to #24 in the US, which was the highest she ever charted. Moore remained active as a musician throughout the '00s, but focused on acting in the '10s, landing a starring role on the acclaimed show This Is Us in 2016. In 2020, she returned to music with the album Silver Landings.
• This was released as a single about a month before it appeared on the album and also on the Center Stage soundtrack. The single/album version is different from the one used in the movie and on the soundtrack. Various remixes were also released.
• The music video ties into the Center Stage movie, which is about a group of ballet dancers. Moore appears in a dance studio where she sings the song as images from the film go by. It was directed by Nigel Dick, whose other videos include "Sweet Child O' Mine" for Guns N' Roses and many of Britney Spears' early videos.