Songfacts®:

• Train's 2006 album For Me, It's You was a very personal one for lead singer Pat Monahan, who was going through tribulations in his personal life, including a divorce. It fared poorly, and the band split for a while. When they returned to action, they had a new strategy: Make pop music with hit potential, and get help making it.
  
  The result was their 2009 album Save Me San Francisco. The first single was "Hey Soul Sister," which became one of the most ubiquitous songs of 2010. The next single was "If It's Love," which Monahan wrote the same day and relies on the same kind of clever wordplay. He worked on it with the New York songwriter Gregg Wattenberg, who produced it along with Martin Terefe and the Norwegian hit-making team Espionage.
• When Train appeared on The Howard Stern Show December 16, 2010, Pat Monahan said that this song is about "the fans that have been with us through all the weird times."
• In the lyric, Monahan sings of all of these great things he's getting for his girl except, "cologne, 'cause it's poison." He explained to The Huffington Post: "Have you ever been in an elevator with a lady who just got done perfuming? If you have, you won't wonder why I wrote it."
• The music video envisions what would happen if Train took a break from music. It was directed by Pete Wentz; there's not a lot of crossover between Train and Wentz' group Fall Out Boy, but they had the same manager. Wentz came up with the idea to have the band parody themselves.
• This reached #1 on the Billboard Adult Pop Song chart, a survey which premiered in March 1996. It was the 100th record to reach pole position on this tally since its inception.
• When the song ascended to #1 on Adult Pop Songs chart, Train's previous hit, "Hey Soul Sister," was logging its 10th week on top of the Adult Contemporary chart. This marked the first time that different songs by the same artist ranked at #1 on Adult Pop and Adult Contemporary in the same week.