Songfacts®:

• In the tradition of the lovelorn R&B songs Huey Lewis grew up listening to, "If This Is It" finds him at the nexus of a love affair, trying to figure out if it's really over. As third-party observers, we know it is (she's cheating on you, Huey!) but he's still putting the pieces together.
• The music inspired the lyric. Huey Lewis & the News saxophone player Johnny Colla, who also did lots of their arrangements, wrote the track and scatted out placeholder words for Lewis' lyrics. Nothing came to him, but then one day on the tour bus it hit him.
  
  "I was in my bunk and I had this epiphany," he said in a Songfacts interview. "The song is major and minor together sometimes, so it's complicated, and the music is telling me that there's confusion in there. That's when I got 'If This Is It.' That might not make any sense, but it made sense to me."
• "If This Is It" was the fourth single from Sports, the third album from Huey Lewis & the News. The band couldn't get a drizzle when they released their self-titled debut album in 1980, but their next album, Picture This in 1982, contained their first hit: "Do You Believe In Love?" When it rains it pours, and Sports was a deluge, one of just five albums to hit #1 in 1984 in America. "If This Is It" reached its chart peak of #6 on September 15, 1984, exactly a year after the album was released. It wasn't even the last single: "Walking On A Thin Line" followed and reached #18 that December.
• Huey Lewis & the News had lots of goofy fun in their videos, which was exactly what MTV was looking for. They would often star Lewis as a normal guy surrounded by lunatics played by his bandmates.
  
  "If This Is It," directed by Edd Griles, is set on the beach in Santa Cruz, California, and finds Lewis wandering around while all kinds of strange stuff happens around him. There's a dude playing tennis in the water, a seance, and two beautiful girls that keep popping up.
  
  At one point, there's a shot of one of the women sunbathing in front of Lewis' five bandmates whose heads are popping out of the sand, singing in unison. This shot made MTV's sizzle reel along with Tom Petty's Mad Hatter and Devo's dude ranch.