Songfacts®:

• This bluesy plea for forgiveness from a lover who fears he has destroyed a relationship was the first single to be released from Boarding House Reach, along with "Respect Commander." Jack White produced and recorded the song in three locations: Nashville, New York City and Los Angeles. It's the first time White has recorded an album in the latter two cities.
• This was the first song that Jack White wrote for Boarding House Reach in the Nashville apartment that he keeps to work on new songs. He told Rolling Stone: "I just started humming notes out loud, staring out the window. After that, you really can't explain it. You just have to get out of the way and let it happen. And you don't really notice it as it's happening."
  
  White added that he first thought the song was "maybe some old melody I'm copying from some old song from 40 years ago, subconsciously – those are all the perils of trying to, you know, bring something new into the universe."
• The song was originally titled "Infected by Love," but White didn't want listeners to think he was singing about STDs. "I thought 'Well, people won't get that metaphor - they'll turn that into, 'Well, Do you have an STD, or something?'," he said. "It might hurt the rest of the messages of the song if I kept that as the main thing. So I changed 'Infected' to 'Connected' and then started to feed off of that."
• What have I done
  I have pushed away everyone
  
  Despite using the personal pronoun, White doesn't see the confessional lyrics as being about himself but rather as made-up people in his imagination. He explained. "I think these characters in my head, you have to put them in places where they're in peril, you know? To me, I've always told people the pronouns don't mean much; she, he, man, women. I say 'woman' in that song but it doesn't really mean 'woman.' They're just ways to get into a character's head and try and see how I relate to your own life, and maybe other times people can relate to that about pushing away the people they love the most. So that was that character's lowest moment in the song, and [he had] to rise above it, you know?"
  
  "I'm still kind of learning about that song," White added. "The melody was coming straight from my gut. You start putting yourself into this character's mindset and see what you can make out of it. It's almost like someone pushed you out on stage on a Broadway show, through the curtains and all of the sudden you are told 'Your name is this.' you know?"
• The backing vocalists Ann & Regina McCrary of Nashville's legendary gospel trio the McCrary Sisters sing the song's title as a refrain during the hook. The threesome also provided gospel harmonies for Maren Morris' country hit "My Church."
• Jack White told Mojo magazine, "With 'Connected By Love,' I wrote it myself, recorded it in my apartment on the 4-track I had when I was a teenager, produced it, mixed it in my own studio, released it on my own label, pressed it at my own pressing plant... I don't think anyone's ever done this in history. There's nothing more DIY than that."