“I Don’t Want to Wait” is a song by singer-songwriter Paula Cole. It was the second single from her sophomore album ‘This Fire’ released in 1996.

It is most commonly known as the theme song for the TV Teen Drama Series Dawson’s Creek but it was written as a tribute to her grandfather who was a World War II veteran.

In a self-penned essay for Huffington Post, Cole expounded on the genesis of the song, its meaning, and its impact on her family:

I wrote “I Don’t Want To Wait” during the summer of 1996, right before the release of my second album, “This Fire.” I was in my apartment at 320 W. 15th Street in New York City, where I lived for six incredibly productive and musically generative years. The song was written at my little spinet piano and it was the very last song I wrote before I went into the studio. On that particular day, I had a feeling my grandfather was going to die and the song came very quickly — like a lightning bolt — and I wrote almost all of it in one sitting.

It’s amazing that premonitions sometimes come true. My grandfather ended up dying just a few months later, right after the release of “This Fire.” I was very close to my grandparents — they lived right down the street from me when I was growing up — and I would often go to their house to visit them. On the day I wrote “I Don’t Want To Wait” I was thinking about my grandfather and his effect on my dad’s life — as well as the marriage between my grandfather and my grandmother, which was filled with a lot of fighting and unhappiness. I thought about how those cycles get repeated from one generation to the next and how I didn’t want that for myself. In that moment I was thinking about how short life is and how I wanted to live my life wide awake.

The song just burst out of me and it felt uplifting and important and so it made the cut.