This is the eponymous track from Jones' debut album. She penned the song herself. Though the album won 8 Grammys, and the song itself sold 20 million copies, it didn’t chart on the Billboard Hot 100. Jones discussed the making of this song with author Bill Demain:

I hadn’t written since I was about 16, and I’d only written two songs back then and they were so bad that I just gave up. But I’d come back from seeing Tony Scherr play and I had seen Jesse and Richard probably, and all that came together in my mind. I had sent for my acoustic guitar in Texas, which is a really crappy guitar, and I wrote it on that. The chords are really simple. It came out in 10 or 15 minutes, and I wrote it down. I didn’t have a tape recorder at that time, so I was nervous that I was going to forget it… It’s difficult to get to a place where songs come out that quickly, but it’s so great when they do. The next day, I wrote ‘What Am I to You?’ the very same way.