Songfacts®:

• This heartbreaker about the dissolution of a relationship that was perhaps doomed from the start finds Steve Earle duetting with Miranda Lambert. He told Artist Direct how the collaboration came about:
  
  "I made the decision a little while ago to go to Nashville and start writing with people from time to time. A lot of those were with Guy Clark, the last few years of his life, he started co-writing, and I always resisted it. I didn't do very much of it. I did with Shawn Colvin for our record, but that was a little different. And maybe that made this a little easier decision, but I made the point to write with several people and one of 'em was Miranda and we wrote that songs and it was just perfect for this record.
  
  Her record was already in the can by the time we managed to schedule a writing session, so we knew we were kind of writing for my record. We wrote 'This Is How It Ends' and it was written for us to sing together and we did. That's live, she came to Austin and we tracked it with the band, both of us singing live. It was a lot of fun."