Shelly Peiken and Guy Roche wrote this song, and Roche also produced it. The song finds Aguilera singing the praises of a guy who knows how to treat a lady and stand by her.
This was originally named "What a Girl Needs" and pitched to RCA executive Ron Fair under that title, with the lyric, "What a girl needs, what a girl wants." Fair thought "needs" sounded too, well, needy, so he had the writers flip it to "What a girl wants, what a girl needs." This also gave it some alliteration between "what a" and "wants."
The song came from a few lyrics written by Peiken on the back of a receipt. She recalled: "I had been dating a guy for three years, and I finally got my butt to LA where he was. I started co-writing with lots of people, and I went over to Guy's (Guy Roche) one day and he was freestyling on the keyboard. Which prompted me to excavate for a receipt (with lyrics written on it) in my coat jacket about (my now-husband) giving me space when I wanted to move to Los Angeles. New York is a very hard place to leave. And this song came from that. Most of my most successful songs, I think, have come from my real life situations. That one did as well. We knew Ron was making a record with Christina, and we played it for him and he asked me for the swap, and it just, it flew."
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