Songfacts®:

• "Someone To Call My Lover" is built on the guitar riff from the 1972 America song "Ventura Highway." Janet Jackson wrote it with her producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Lifting a soft-rock hit from the '70s doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for a dance-pop act like Jackson, but Jimmy Jam told Songfacts that Janet loves many kinds of music and was always willing to try different ideas.
  
  Describing the construction of this song, he said, "For 'Someone to Call My Lover,' she hadn't heard the 'Ventura Highway' sample before. She hadn't heard those songs. So it's kind of fun to come up with stuff like that and play it for her. And she hasn't heard of it, but she still really likes it. So you have something that's going to appeal to people that haven't heard it before, it's going to catch them, but it's also going to catch the people who are nostalgic about it."
• In this breezy song, Jackson thinks about her potential soulmate and starts to manifest him. She figures they'll meet at a bar or in the club and he'll impress her with his funky car. From there it will be happily ever after.
  
  The song is one of Janet's more PG-rated hits, coming years after tunes like "Nasty," "Black Cat" and "If" where she's a lot more assertive. The song is part of her All For You album, which has an equally anodyne title track. That song was the last of Jackson's 10 #1 hits; "Someone to Call My Lover" was the next single, reaching #3.
• When this song was released, Janet really was looking for someone to call her lover: she had just ended her 10-year marriage to Rene Elizondo Jr. while recording the album.
• The loop played throughout the chorus was borrowed from the Classical piece "Gymnopédie No. 1" by French composer Erik Satie. Jackson first heard it on a TV commercial when she was a child and never forgot it.
• Jackson first worked with So So Def producer Jermaine Dupri, who would become her longtime boyfriend, on a remix of this song that was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 2002, but lost to Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like A Bird."
  
  A remix (OK a re-edit) of the video was also released for "So So Def" mix.
• This song was used in the animated series Neighbors From Hell on the episode "Country Club Hell" in 2010.