Songfacts®:

• "Keep Calling Me (Baby)" is a gentle, bass-driven blend of dubby calypso and shimmery sunshine-pop. The parenthetical "(Baby)" is the key to the song's elastic charm. It isn't strictly romantic; for frontman James Petralli, "baby" can mean a lover, a child, even a dog; a blanket term of affection for whatever living thing happens to be near enough to be adored.
• The title came about spontaneously from frontman James Petralli's domestic life. "Keep Calling Me (Baby) is something I sang in passing," he told Uncut magazine. "I sing to my dog and I sing to my kids, and I ended up making it a real song."
• Before recording it for White Denim's 13 album, Petralli pitched the song to other artists, but his pitch frightened off any takers. "I would start by saying, 'You know, it's like the Cyndi Lauper song, "Goonies R Good Enough," from the Goonies soundtrack, but a Roy Orbison kind of thing. It's also got this Ace of Base thing,'" he told Uncut. "Before I even pressed play on the song, people were like, 'Not for me!'"
• Recorded largely in Petralli's backyard studio in Los Angeles and self-produced during the sprawling sessions that became the album 13, the track emerged from a much larger body of material originally conceived as a 20-song set called Rejoice. That was later split into 12 and 13, with this song landing at the midpoint of the latter. It sits as a moment of levity and joy offering a reprieve from heavier material.