Songfacts®:

• "Willing To Wait" is an early Rihanna song, released on her first album, Music Of The Sun, when she was 17. A lot of the album, including the big hit "Pon De Replay," has a Caribbean sound reflecting her upbringing in Barbados, but this one is straight R&B, with Rihanna letting a guy know that she's not ready to take it to the bedroom just yet, but she likes him and if he's willing to wait, good things will come.
• Rihanna wrote this song with her producers, Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken. Rogers is the guy who discovered her when he was vacationing with his wife in Barbados in 2003. He and Sturken were a team, with hits to their credit for Donny Osmond ("Soldier Of Love"), Nia Peeples ("Street Of Dreams"), and their own group, Rythm Syndicate ("P.A.S.S.I.O.N."). They helped her put together a demo that led to her deal with Def Jam Records, and after she signed with the label, they continued working with her. When she moved to America, Rihanna lived with Rogers and his wife, who is also from Barbados.
• The song shares a chord progression with the 1977 Deniece Williams song "Free," which Def Jam decided was worth paying for, so the writers of that song (Williams, Sue Greene, Henry Redd and Nathan Watts) are credited as writers on "Willing To Wait" along with Rihanna, Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken.
  
  According to Sturken, this was an over-reach on the part of a Def Jam lawyer. "He thought that our chord progression reminded him of 'Free' by Deniece Williams, which it sort of does, but it reminds me of about five other songs as well," Sturken told Songfacts.
• The line, "You know you had me from hello," is a riff on a famous line of dialogue in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, where Renée Zellweger tells Tom Cruise, "You had me at hello."