It was originally recorded by American singer Patti LaBelle for her ninth studio album, Be Yourself (1989), and also for the soundtrack to the James Bond film Licence to Kill.

Pan-European magazine Music & Media described the song as "a smooth, mid-tempo ballad with a synthesizer-dominated AC production by Stewart Levine".

[2] The music video for "If You Asked Me To" was filmed the day after the funeral of LaBelle's sister Jacqueline "Jackie" Padgett who died of lung cancer at age 43.

[9] The single includes a non-album B-side, "Love You Blind", written by Sheryl Crow and Jay Oliver, and produced by Walter Afanasieff.

Later, "If You Asked Me To" was included on the North American versions of Dion's greatest hits albums, All the Way… A Decade of Song (1999) and My Love: Essential Collection (2008).

AllMusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine named "If You Asked Me To" a standout song of the album, along with "Beauty and the Beast" and "Love Can Move Mountains".

[14] Dave Sholin from the Gavin Report felt that Dion "deserves all the accolades she's gotten the past few years, and surely her rendition of this touching Diane Warren ballad [...] takes her to a new level".

[16] Geoff Edgers from Salon Magazine wrote that "If You Asked Me To", "with Dion's moaning, pleading, screaming take-me vocals, works when reassessed as a chunk of modern soul as worthy as anything recorded by Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey".

[17] Jonathan Bernstein from Spin declared the song as "sensational", adding that it "proves that astringency, urgency, and dressing down may win out over homogeneity, artifice, and insincerity, but a good Diane Warren hook lives forever.