Songfacts®:

• This song about heartbreak makes reference to some R&B songs that share a similar theme: you can't stop thinking about the person you broke up with. In the song, Mariah is listening to the radio when Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now" comes on. Womack is a very influential soul singer who recorded that song on his 1981 album The Poet. It gets a little intense, so Mariah changes the station, only to hear Babyface singing "Two Occasions," a song he recorded with The Deele, a group formed by L.A. Reid (Babyface and Reid went on to form LaFace records). That song contains the classic line, "I only think of you on two occasions: that's day and night." Not a good way to get over someone.
• "We Belong Together" was everywhere in the summer of 2005, when it was #1 for an astounding 14 weeks. It also won the Grammy Awards for Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance that year - Carey performed it at the ceremony.
• The song is on Mariah Carey's 10th album, The Emancipation of Mimi. Surprisingly, it wasn't the first single; that honor goes to the far less-remembered "It's Like That."
  
  The video for "We Belong Together," directed by Brett Ratner, is a sequel to the video for "It's Like That." Both videos feature Eric Roberts and Wentworth Miller, who went on to fame on the Fox TV series Prison Break. Carey plays Mimi, who is set to marry Roberts but can't get over Miller, even on her wedding day.
• The wedding dress that Mariah wears in the video is the same one in which she got married to Tommy Mottola in 1993. Mottola and Carey divorced in 1998, but she held onto the wedding dress, and when the video's director needed a dress, she offered to wear it.
• The song's 14 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 equals the longest stay at the top position in the 21st century. In 2009, The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" also managed 14 weeks at the summit.
• In America, "We Belong Together" was the top song of the 2000s, according to Billboard. In second place is "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani, followed by "Let Me Love You" by Mario.
• To give you an idea of how often this song got played on the radio, we turn to data from the monitoring service Broadcast Data Systems, which said it achieved a peak audience of 212 million on the week of July 9, 2005, the highest ever audience total since the Hot 100 radio panel was expanded to include all formats in December 1998.
  
  The song's audience rule was ended eight years later when Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" achieved 219.8 million all-format audience impressions on the chart dated August 17, 2013.
• Jermaine Dupri, who produced the song, recalled to Hits Daily Double: "The first two [songs] we did, 'It's Like That' and 'Get Your Number' were more uptempo. When we got back together in the studio, my idea was, let's try some ballads this time - let's flip the switch. We put a condenser mic in the studio so we could record every idea we came up with. When we went to play it back, you could hear the song coming to life. I cut the vocal myself at first, and she followed my direction to a T."
• The song was done in just one day. Jermaine Dupri recalled to Billboard:
  
  "Mariah came to the studio at 10 p.m. and we worked through the morning until she got on another plane at 9 A.M. We stayed in the studio from 10 until 9 in the morning. I was so tired.
  
  There was this one line that they had a space for and she said, 'Come up with a line, Jermaine.' I came up with the line, but I was so tired that I didn't want to put the line down. But she was like, 'No, I need this song finished right now.' It was so crazy, because her energy about the song was almost felt like she knew it was going to become what it did."
• Carey loves hip-hop and wanted to intensify the urban flavor on this track, but Jermaine Dupri talked her out of it. He recalled in his 2007 book Young, Rich, and Dangerous: The Making of a Music Mogul: "The songwriting went smoothly, but, musically, me and Mariah had some back-and-forth. At first Mariah was pushing for something more ghetto. 'No it's too out there, too urban,' I said. 'Lean it more towards the middle.' I didn't want her doing all the syrupy ballad stuff her past label executives tried to push her into. She also needed to hold herself back from trilling up and down the scales. I wanted to keep the power of her voice inside the framework of a great song. We finally agreed on what she called a 'thugged-out ballad.'"
• The outro is distinctly Mariah. She goes into another gear vocally, making it sound like this heartache might leave her mortally wounded.
  
  She usually maps these out in the studio, but this one was off-the-cuff.
  
  "I did the outro really fast," she told Billboard. "Thankfully, it's not that all over the place or that complicated, so I was able to get it done. I'm always like, why did I do that? And now, how am I going to do it again?"
• The writers of "Two Occasions" and "If You Think You're Lonely Now" earned songwriting credits on this track because some lyrics from each were used. There are four other credited writers: Mariah Carey, producer Jermaine Dupri, and two writers in Dupri's camp: Johnta Austin and Manuel Seal.