Songfacts®:

• "This Life" is a bright, melodic track on which Ezra Koenig sings about love not being what he thought it was.
  
  Baby, I know pain is as natural as the rain
  I just thought it didn't rain in California
  
  The couple's relationship has deteriorated to the extent that both parties are cheating on each other.
• The song features backing vocals from Danielle Haim and additional guitar from Jake Longstreth, who co-hosts the Beats 1 radio show Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
• Danielle Haim is the romantic partner of Father of the Bride producer Ariel Rechtshaid. The album was partly recorded at Haim's house, in Rechtshaid's home studio.
  
  "I would come in to say what up, and Ezra would be like, 'Hey, listen to what I wrote, do you want to put some harmonies on it?'" she explained to Pitchfork. "I wasn't really a great host. When Ariel and Ezra start working, they're in the zone. I never really wanted to bother them."
• During the hook Ezra Koenig interpolates iLoveMakonnen's 2014 song "Tonight."
  
  Koenig spoke about what drew him to those lines on "Tonight," citing the importance of both party's having cheated. He explained that he started to think about what how an adult should deal with a situation in which two people have done something wrong.
  
  "You bite the bullet and say: OK you cheated on me, I cheated on you, but I can only start with myself... Actually I have been cheating through my whole life. So maybe I have to examine my whole way of thinking."
• ILoveMakonnen and Koenig previously worked together on the former's "Down 4 So Long" remix.
• Directed by Emmett Malloy, the black-and-white video finds Ezra Koenig, Danielle Haim and Ariel Rechtshaid traveling through the deserts of Palm Springs, California. They end up at a Passover dinner out in the wilderness where the other guests include Jovan Hill (of Twitter fame), Mark Ronson, Sophie, and Despot.
• The Anglo-American producer Mark Ronson helped write the bassline on this song. Ezra Koenig told Q Magazine: "It was fun getting people in I'm friendly with that I never did serious work with."