Together Again

This song is Janet Jackson's dedication to all of her friends she lost to AIDS. She can still feel their presence and knows that someday they will be together again in heaven. In the liner notes to the album, Jackson names her fallen friends: Dominic, George, Derrick, Bobby, Dominic, Victor, José, and writes, "I miss you, and we will be together again."

Jackson had a large LGBT following but didn't release any songs that dealt specifically with that community until The Velvet Rope, her sixth album. Other tracks include a cover of Rod Stewart's "Tonight's The Night (Gonna Be Alright)" where she sings to a female lover, and "Free Xone," which deals with same sex relationships and espouses "one love." From a marketing standpoint, Jackson had little to gain with these kind of songs, but they were important to her so she stood up to the resistance from her record company, Virgin." "Before I wrote the song, I told some of the people at the label the concept for the song, and they didn't think it was a good idea," she told New Now Next. "I thought, 'You know, this is really stupid.' It was in my heart."

Jackson wrote this song with the songwriting/production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and her then-husband Rene Elizondo Jr. Elizondo also directed one of the music videos for the song, which shows Jackson reminiscing in her apartment about a friend she lost. The Jam/Lewis team had been working with Jackson since her 1986 album Control. This combination had one of the greatest runs of hits in the history of popular music; Jam and Lewis kept working with Jackson through her 2006 album 20 Y.O.