Songfacts®:

• Amerie wrote this with producer Rich Harrison, who also produced the similar sounding "Crazy In Love" and also worked on Amerie's first album.
• The music is based on a kinetic drum loop taken from The Meters 1970 version of "Oh! Calcutta!," which was written by Samuel Walden. Harrison started with the sample, then wrote the melodies and lyrics for the song with Amerie.
  
  "The way he flipped it is what really made it feel go-go," Amerie told Billboard of Harrison's soundscape for "1 Thing". "It was pretty easy, because I was used to Rich at that point. So all of that was different from some of the stuff that we did before. There's a certain kind of common thread that he has in his percussion and his production, but I will say when I first heard it, it was a little like, 'OK.' It was that moment when I was like, 'All right. I'm gonna sing over this.'"
• This was included on the soundtrack to the 2005 romantic comedy Hitch starring Will Smith. The music video is included on the DVD.
• At first, Amerie's record company Sony refused to release this as a single, and despite Harrison's protests the song remained on the shelf for a year and a half. When Jennifer Lopez expressed some interest in recording it, Amerie and Harrison decided to leak the track to some radio stations. There was a positive response and when the track became an unofficial hit, Sony was finally forced to release it as a single.
• When this became a hit, Lauryn Hill incorporated it into live performances of her song "Doo Wop (That Thing)." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Donovan Berry - El Dorado, AR