Songfacts®:

• This tender acoustic song takes a lyrical cue from the Jackson 5 hit "ABC," where falling in love is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Plain White T's Lead singer Tom Higgenson wrote it for his girlfriend at the time, Angie Chavez. In the song, he tells her over and over that he loves her, which she makes as easy as counting.
• Plain White T's started as a pop-punk band with mostly uptempo rock songs, but after their ballad "Hey There Delilah" took off in 2007, they were more likely to produce songs in that vein, like "1, 2, 3, 4." Fans loved it - the song sold 2 million digital copies and garnered 10s of millions of streams, giving them a solid hit in addition to "Delilah."
  
  "For a good five years it was amazing," Tom Higgenson told Songfacts. "We were working our asses off but seeing the rewards for it."
• The band considered changing this track's title because of the Feist song of the same name released a year earlier.
• The video, directed by Mike Venezia, shows Higgenson busking in Chicago on a December day in 2008. As he plays, crowds gather and some people recognize him - nobody in the clip is an actor. Throughout the video, we see couples and groups of families and friends with graphics explaining who they are and how they got together. In the end, Higgenson meets up with Angie, and we learn that they met in Chicago.
• Tom Higgenson considers this one of the best songs he's written, right up there with "Hey There Delilah." It's played at just about every Plain White T's concert.
• The video premiered on MySpace, whose founder, Tom Anderson, was a huge fan of the band.
• The band performed this in a 2009 episode of the soap opera One Life To Live titled "Dads And The T's." That same year, it was also used in the 90210 episode "Of Heartbreaks And Hotels."