MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)
Song Meaning

MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) is about Lil Nas X’s immediate, consuming infatuation and lust for a man he became involved with one summer, a real encounter that began as a DM exchange rather than an actual phone call 1. The title and “call me by your name” refrain come directly from the film Call Me by Your Name, whose theme of lovers adopting each other’s names Lil Nas X found so compelling that he built the whole song around it 1. He has called it “very much a lust song” 1 and one of the most personal, vulnerable tracks he’s ever released 1. Beyond the romance, he wrote the explicit content intentionally, wanting to normalize queer men singing about sex as openly as straight artists always have 1.

The meaning

At its core, MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) is Lil Nas X narrating a real, specific night: during a break from recording his album, he visited another artist’s house and the two hit it off fast 1. He’s described the spark as sudden and overwhelming, comparing it to Usher’s “U Got It Bad”: “I’m already falling for this person who I just met” 1. The lyric “you hit me with a call to your place” is a slight dramatization of what actually happened, since the real inciting moment was a DM rather than a phone call, adjusted because “a call works better for this song” 1.

The title itself is doing double duty. It borrows directly from the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, whose central conceit, lovers calling each other by their own names as a way of merging identities and keeping their relationship close and hidden, struck Lil Nas X as “so dope” 1. He’s explained the mechanics plainly: “it’s my name, the song is my name, but it’s the person’s name because I’m calling them by my own name” 1, turning the film’s romantic device into the song’s entire hook.

Sexually, the song is blunt by design. Lil Nas X has called it “really very much a lust song” 1, and lines like “I wanna feel on your ass in Hawaii” sit alongside that description rather than against it. He’s been explicit that this rawness was a choice, not an accident: he wanted “these fuckin’ lines in songs the same way” straight artists rap about sex with women, arguing it matters “for representation in general” 1. In that sense, the song’s explicitness is inseparable from its meaning, it’s a queer hip-hop song refusing to soften or hide its desire.

Underneath the lust, though, is real emotional exposure. The post-chorus line “tell me you love me in private” captures a specific kind of desperation, wanting affection from someone even if it isn’t fully genuine or public. Lil Nas X has explained this as the feeling of getting “too simp” in a relationship, needing to hear the words even when you suspect they aren’t true: “I don’t even care if you don’t really mean it. Just say it, you know, maybe I’ll believe it” 1. He’s called the track one of the most “real” and “vulnerable” he’s ever made 1.

The verses also sketch a period of personal excess, drugs, drinking, and a string of encounters, that he’s tied to a specific low point in his life, a “spiral moment” of heavy partying 1, and to the seductive, consuming pull of Hollywood’s party culture, which he says can make people “lost” 1. Lines about envy (“I wanna fuck the ones I envy”) aren’t about jealousy in a competitive sense, he’s clarified it means admiring and wanting someone specifically, “I love what this person is about. I want this person” 1. The humming in the post-chorus works the same way, a wordless, intimate communication between the two people in the song 1. Taken together, Lil Nas X has framed the whole track as part of a broader cultural moment, calling it “a sign of the times” for LGBTQ+ visibility in mainstream music 1.

Last updated 2026-08-06