Songfacts®:

• Millie Jackson's biggest pop hit, "Ask Me What You Want" was her second single, after "A Child of God (It's Hard to Believe)." She had a series of R&B hits in a long and illustrious recording career, but never crossed over to the mainstream, which didn't bother her a bit. In a Songfacts interview with Millie Jackson, she explained: "In America I think in order to be a pop star you've got to have management. And I always managed myself. I was never looking to become that crossover pop star. Let white folks cross over to me. I call myself the poor people's queen. Because once you get to the top there's only one way to go."
• Jackson wrote this with Billy Nichols, who went on to write "Do It ('Til You're Satisfied)" for B.T. Express. Jackson writes lyrics, which start out as poems. She told Songfacts: "You just take poems and have somebody put some music behind it, or you get an idea in your head as to how the melody is, and you hum it and somebody else plays it. And by the time I learned enough about music to do it myself, I found that the music part was boring and it's worth 50% of the song to give it to somebody else to do it and get it over with. (laughs)"
• After her self-titled debut album was released, Jackson took control of her career and took a role in producing her own material, and hearing this song helped lead her in that direction. Said Jackson: "My first album is not my natural voice. They speeded up my voice, it was too low for a woman they thought, so they speeded up all my tracks a half a step, so everything would be higher than I actually sing it in. The first song I recorded that came out in my natural voice was 'Hurts So Good.' On 'Ask Me What You Want,' I'm almost one of the Chipmunks."