At the time this piece was composed, the 34-year-old Satie had not yet established his reputation in the music world. Consequently, it was difficult for him to make a living solely from composing art music, and he continued to work as a café pianist and a composer of songs and incidental music for music halls and cabarets. Satie himself considered his approximately 15 years (1890-1905) as a "great degradation," yet many of the café-concert pieces (music composed for cafés, which became popular in France around the 1860s) written during this period can be considered excellent works.

A representative work among them is "Je te veux." This waltz is so famous that it is still used in commercials today. It has been translated into Japanese in various ways, such as "I Want You," "You I Want," or "I Love You." Originally, it was a chanson for voice and piano, set to lyrics (attributed to H. Pacory), characterized by having both a female and a male version of the lyrics. The song (chanson) is in a simple ternary form, while the piano solo version adds a middle section (trio) to the song's form, resulting in a compound ternary form. It is one of the few works by Satie from this period that features bar lines, and its unpretentious, natural flow is pleasing.