Songfacts®:

• This is the title track and first single from the North Carolina folk-rock trio The Avett Brothers. It was their major label debut after five independent albums.
• This autumnal track was chosen by Starbucks iTunes as their Pick of the Week for September 22, 2009.
• Rick Rubin, whose credits include Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, produced the album.
• Scott Avett told Rolling Stone magazine that I And Love And You was inspired by an unlikely classic Rubin production: the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, "But without the heroin addiction."
• The chorus of this piano ballad goes, "Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in." Scott Avett explained to Spinner that the song was inspired by a gig at Brooklyn's Galapagos. "It was the coolest place we'd ever been, and the furthest from home we'd ever been in every sense," he said. "So the Brooklyn chorus kind of embodies the rest of the lyrics."
• Scott Avett told American Songwriter the lyrics came from thinking about "a father or mother and son relationship and the difficulty of being able to tell them, 'I love you.'"