Songfacts®:

• This Josh Kear, Chris Tompkins and Rodney Clawson penned song was the first single from Frankie Ballard's Sunshine & Whiskey album. "Helluva Life," explained the singer to The Tenesssean, is about the "good stuff and bad stuff that happens to us. We lean on each other in the good times and the bad times, and sometimes it's hard to see where we're going when we're in the middle of it."
• Ballard changed his entire process of making music for Sunshine & Whiskey having found a producer in Marshall Altman, who allowed him to get hands-on. "That's all I ever wanted," Ballard said. "I'm a guitar player and I wanted to be involved and experiment a little. We came out with some music that I think really sounds like me."
• Ballard told CMT that the first time he heard the song it took him back to his teen years: "I started getting all nostalgic and thinking about high school and thinking about stupid things I did back when I was 16 or 18 or whatever," he recalled. "It's such a cool message - that you've got to appreciate what you have in your life. And it even goes so far as to say you should appreciate the bad times because they make the good times better."
• Ballard's first two singles "Tell Me You Get Lonely" and "A Buncha Girls" got into the Top 40, but didn't take off as he had hoped. This song's sentiments were something that the Michigan native needed to hear. "It was incredibly parallel with what was going on in my life," said Ballard. "It's such an appropriate thing for me to be releasing as my first single off the new project. I thought my first single was gonna come out and, ka-pow, be off to the races, but that didn't happen. But at the end of the day, I feel very blessed to be in the game and to have a new single."
• Ballard's marketing people organised an Internet campaign where if anyone uses #helluvalife in a post or a picture, it got funneled into a site. The singer told Billboard magazine: "People can come and look at other people's stories, which range from deep subjects of love and heartbreak to having a six pack with your buddies on a Saturday night – whatever makes their life a 'helluva life.'"
• Frankie Ballard's favorite thing about the song is how true it is about his life. He told Rolling Stone Country: "Ups and downs, curve balls. Everyone goes through those moments where they say, 'Man, it couldn't get any better, or worse, than this.' Saying, 'it's a helluva life' is a way to chalk it up. I just knew the way it made me feel was how it was going to make everybody feel."