[4] The album was produced by Marius de Vries and mixed by Andy Bradfield, with Lenny Waronker as the executive in charge of production.

[15] "I Don't Know What It Is" appeared on the UK Singles Chart for one week, entering on August 7, 2004 and reaching its peak position at number 74.

A thirty-second commercial which contained audio samples of "Oh What a World" and "I Don't Know What It Is" aired on television just prior to the album's release.

Wainwright also appeared on Play, CNN's "Headline News" and a local airing of Central Park SummerStage to promote Want One.

Live at the Fillmore, which contained songs from Want One and later accompanied the release of Want Two, originally aired as a special on the cable television network Trio in May 2004.

[19][20] Wainwright said the following of "Movies of Myself", with its "straight-ahead bounce, drum-led clip, and aberrant guitar crunch":[21] The song is about knowing the end result of every situation you're in, and being able to play it out in your mind and see it before it happens.

[18]Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani described "Go or Go Ahead" as a "multi-tiered, emotionally-charged epic that could pass for a paranoid Radiohead song".

The two had recently finished a photo shoot for Rolling Stone and were eating together when Rufus joked that his success had gotten his father back into the magazine.

"Go or Go Ahead" contains celestial and mythological references, from angels, stars, planets, and Mars to vampires and Medusa (along with the phrase "Look in her eyes"), a female chthonic monster that turns onlookers to stone.

The last verse, which mentions "something burning" in Manhattan, alludes to the September 11 attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

The song contains an allusion to the Biblical story of David and Goliath with the phrase "I'm gonna take you down with one little stone".

AllMusic's Zac Johnson described the album as "another set of obscenely lush and opulent pop operettas... meticulously layered and richly textured, with full orchestral passages and many-throated harmonies".

[4] Wainwright's style caused Sal Cinquemani of Slant to draw comparisons to a giant peacock's kaleidoscopic tail, and he insisted that producer Marius de Vries "[kept] the singer's opulent poperas and lush ballads in check while bringing them to a new level of lovely pageantry".

[3] Entertainment Weekly's Marc Weingarten characterized the album as a "gorgeous meditation on emotional displacement", with "clever, gently ironic wordplay".

[27] In his review for Rolling Stone, David Fricke called the album a record of "breathtaking, eccentric opulence" and a "loving nod to the vocal and poetic gifts he inherited from his parents", folk musicians Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle.

Blender's RJ Smith called Wainwright's "carnival-esque piano playing... so thick, the music all but drowns in pretty surfaces".

The review also criticized "Movies of Myself", describing the song as having "plaintive vocals [that] jar against stadium-rock guitars and dubious Eighties keyboards".

[25] Contrastingly, Pitchfork's review singles out "Vibrate", "Natasha", "Pretty Things", and "Want" for being "simply too sparse to offer any real substance".

In 2010, while promoting the release of a live double album, David Bowie praised "Dinner at Eight" as "the best" father/son song he knew, calling Rufus "simply one of the great writers.

"[35] In 2011, in Planet Word, author and BBC producer John-Paul Davidson, in a discussion of poetry and song, called Dinner at Eight "no finer expression of an argument between a son and a father who abandoned him.