To Be With You - 2010 Remastered Version

One of the great unrequited love songs, "To Be With You" has a true story behind it. Mr. Big lead singer Eric Martin wrote the song when he was still a teenager - 16 or 17 in his estimation. The girl was Patricia Reynolds, and he had it bad for her. "We were really, really good friends," Martin said in a Songfacts interview. "I was totally enamored with this woman. She was beautiful. Smart. I mean, brains, beauty, break down the walls, made me crawl on my belly like a reptile! I just loved this woman, but she just wanted to be my friend. She'd have tons of boyfriends, and maybe she misconstrued promiscuity for love. But I wanted to be the knight in shining armor. That's what I was, a knight in shining armor. But basically, I didn't get my feet wet. I wrote it about how I would have done anything to just be more than a friend and a confidante."

By the time he put this song together, Eric Martin knew that he and Patricia were not to be. He had a different motivation by this point. "I wrote it mainly to impress my sister's girlfriends," he said.

This song has very spare instrumentation, mainly just a bass drum, acoustic guitar and hand claps. This is a key component of the song, as it accentuates the heart-rending lyrics. Eric Martin completed the song with David Grahame, a songwriter his publisher teamed him up with. Grahame was in the Beatlemania show - he played Paul McCartney. The cassette demo Martin had made of "To Be With You" was in the folk vein; when Grahame heard it, he thought of the Beatles song "Give Peace A Chance," which uses a spare, improvised percussion and group chorus. He suggested they do something similar with "To Be With You," and it worked, giving the song a distinct sound that draws out the story.