Lobo found the song’s inspiration in his high school art class years before he actually wrote the lovelorn ballad. “I wanted to write the big ballad. There was a conscious effort to do that. The premise behind that was what I imagined in school. I had a really pretty art teacher,” he told loBURN Magazine in 2015. “I was a high school senior and the teacher was 22. And she looked at me and I looked at her and there was a connection. That line, ‘The obligation that you made, for the title that they gave,’ was about that. It was the love you couldn’t have. You know?”
The song was Lobo’s highest-charting hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it spent two weeks at No. 2 in November. The single was the second of four of his songs to hit No. 1 on the Easy Listening chart, where it had a one-week stay at that top spot in December 1972. It became a gold record.
When released in the United Kingdom in 1972, the song failed to reach the UK Singles Chart; however, a re-release of the single in 1974, on the UK record label, peaked at No. 5.
This was used on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in the 2012 episode, “Tressed To Kill.”
“I’d Love You to Want Me” – Single by Lobo from the album Of a Simple Man.
Released September 1972
Songwriter Roland Kent LaVoie (Lobo)
Charted No.2 US, No.5 UK, No.1 West Germany, No.1 Australia, No.1 Austria, No.1 Canada
