Songfacts®:

• "Last Call" was the lead off single to Lee Ann Womack's first album for three and a half years, Call Me Crazy. It's about an ex who has a tendency to call at the end of a drunken night, making one last call during last call at the bar.
  
  The song was written by Erin Enderlin and Shane McAnally, and based on a real person in McAnally's life.
  
  When AOL asked Womack how she came to choose this haunting song, she replied that she loved its melody, and added: "When I heard the demo, melodically and lyrically, I thought it could be classic Lee Ann Womack, meaning what people expect from me. I thought when people heard it they would know immediately it was me singing. And then with all that wrapped up with a really good country lyric, it was a perfect way for me to come back again."
• Veteran producer Tony Brown (Reba McEntire, Brooks & Dunn) produced this song, along with the rest of the album. Womack told Billboard magazine: "I had wanted to work with Tony since I came to town I kind of knew what he would like and what he would gravitate toward and it's a lot of the same things that I do."
• The song's black-and-white music video was filmed in New York. Womack explained why the clip was located in the Big Apple: "I love New York, and I love taking country music to places where it's not heard a lot. I preach the gospel of George Jones and Bob Wills and Ray Price to my friends who are artists and producers in other genres. So it was my idea to do this real traditional record and put it against the backdrop of New York."
• Enderlin and McAnally explained to AOL the story behind this song. Enderlin started off: "Shane starts talking about an old flame that called him out of the blue. Even though the infamous one's name was removed from Shane's phone, the number itself still stopped him in his tracks, like it was branded in his memory. Taking in Shane's story, I started playing the chords he was riffing on and out poured the first couple lines of the song. It was amazing how easily the story came together. Shane and I went back and forth trading lines and chords... the song became almost like a zipper pulling our two creative minds together.
  
  I write a lot of songs, but it is still amazing to me how every so often the right combination of ideas, craft and creativity come together to make something so magical that it seems to have a life of it's own and has the ability to move people, even if they haven't been in that specific situation. I've rarely experienced something more powerful than the connection that comes from a great song, and 'Last Call' is one of those songs."
  
  McAnally continued: "I remember something Erin had said to me a few weeks before, about the practice of showing up every day at a scheduled time to write. She said, 'I know that I won't write something great every day, but I just show up so that when God walks through the room, I will be there.' On this particular day, God walked through the room and we were there.
  
  I think the zipper metaphor was a perfect way to describe the way it unfolded. She would sing a line, and I would sing a line, and so on. I do remember the moment I realized that something big was going on - when she was trying to figure out the melody for the chorus and she sang the following 'dummy' lyric: "I bet you're in a bar." A 'dummy' lyric is a reference to putting any words that come to mind together just to create a structure and a melody. This 'dummy' lyric was far from dumb! I thought it was brilliant. I actually was convinced that "I bet you're in a bar" was the title of the song. The hook, 'Last Call,' later unveiled itself and the rest is country music history."
• Shane McAnally's first placement with a major artist, "Last Call" marked the beginning of a prolific songwriting career. The Nashville-based songwriter has penned numerous hit country songs, such as Sam Hunt's "Body Like a Back Road" and Morgan Wallen's "7 Summers."
  
  "When I was 33, almost 20 years in at that point, I lost my house, lost my car. I was really done," he recalled to Billboard. "Finally, I had a song recorded by Lee Ann Womack, and it gave me this moment of like, 'OK, I have a thread to hang on to.'"