Anything but plain pop music

• By JOHN WIRT
• Music writer
• Published: Jun 26, 2009

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Chicago pop-rock band Plain White T’s beat one-hit wonder status this year by means of a love song called “1,2,3,4.” The song sold one million digital copies, was played more than 27 million times on MySpace, and its moving companion video — featuring singer-guitarist Tom Higgenson busking in frigid downtown Chicago — got more than five million views on YouTube.

“1,2,3,4” followed Plain White T’s’ Grammy-nominated hit, “Hey There Delilah.” Naturally, audiences coming to hear the band during its summer tour know the latter songs, but they also know tracks from the T’s’ albums, including the group’s 2006 major-label debut, Every Second Counts, and last year’s Big Bad World.

“In general,” guitarist and Plain White T’s co-founder Dave Tirio said from Washington, D.C., “the people who come to these shows have been coming for a couple of years now. We get to stretch out on stage and play a lot of our old stuff and definitely see a good reaction.”

The band is dividing its summer shows into three acts: An opening rock set, acoustic middle set and a medley of fan favorites. Plain White T’s earned the right to do their retrospective show. Formed when Tirio and singer-guitarist Tom Higgenson were attending high school in Chicago’s western suburbs, Plain White T’s has been going for nearly 12 years.

During Plain White T’s’ lean early years, Tirio said, bandmate Higgenson had tremendous faith in the group’s potential.

“I was more of the pessimist to his eternal optimist,” Tirio said. “I would always be the one going, ‘Sure, Tom, whatever.’ ”

Nonetheless, Tirio quickly realized how great it would be to do music for a living.

“When we started the band with our friends,” he said, “we realized how much more fun and rewarding it was than anything else we were doing with our lives. I was about to go off to college at the time. I was doing a lot of academic stuff, but I rapidly lost interest in that.”

Tirio disappointed his parents by trading the University of Illinois at Champaign to play community fairs and church basements with his struggling band.  

“It was weird because, all my life, I’d been into academics and done well in school,” he said. “But there’s just something about music. I felt the need to follow it. Tom and I felt like there was no option for failure, so we stuck with it.”

The band members’ parents eventually changed their tunes.

“They saw how hard we were working at it,” Tirio said. “They started to understand and, now, all of our parents, they’re more excited about stuff than we are. They’re our biggest fans.”

Tirio and Higgenson’s parents share credit for their sons’ success. The parents’ vintage record collections shaped the pair’s melodic taste in music.