Songfacts®:

• The first song to be released off Fleet Foxes' third album Crack-Up, this is about frontman Robin Pecknold's relationship with guitarist Skyler Skjelset after the release of their 2011 album Helplessness Blues. He explained to Pitchfork:
  
  "It addresses our distance in the years after touring that album, the feeling of having an unresolved, unrequited relationship that is lingering psychologically. Even if some time apart was necessary and progressive for both of us as individuals, I missed our connection, especially the one we had when we were teenagers, and the lyrics for the song grew out of that feeling."
• The title does not appear in the lyrics. It alludes to Skyler Skjelset's birthday being May 3, and Helplessness Blues being released on May 3, 2011.
• Pitchfork asked Pecknold if the title was directly inspired by Francisco Goya's famous painting Third of May 1808, which commemorates the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War. He replied that it was just "a funny coincidence."
  
  Peknold added: "The painting only served to inspire a few of the lyrics, like, 'Aren't we made to be crowded together like leaves,' or, 'Stood, congregated, at the firing line,' but those lines are about Skye and I, and our time playing music together, and not the political events depicted in the painting."
• The first verse takes place in 2007-2009, the second 2012-2015. The outro is 2015.
• The song's opening line channels famous lyrics by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
  
  Light ended the night, but the song remained
  
  Pecknold explained to Genius: "Meant to evoke lyrics like Dylan's 'There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air' from Tangled Up in Blue or Cohen's 'there's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.' An image of playing music through until morning.
  
  "Light," like the light on the ground in the Goya painting.
  
  Was trying to write a lyric that could describe aspects of the painting and also aspects of our own experience."