Songfacts®:

• T.I. drops some knowledge in "Live Your Life," where discusses his growth and reconciles himself to his lot in life. He had been through a lot by this time, both good and bad. Paper Trail was his third #1 album, but he made most of it while under house arrest on gun charges. He ended up spending a lot of time in jail in 2009.
• This is the song where we learned Rihanna could yodel, albeit with some help from Auto-Tune. She's featured on the track, contributing a verse along with that "mya-HE, mya-HAW, mya-WHO, mya-HAHA" hook that opens the song. The yodel is interpolated from the 2003 European pop smash "Dragostea din Tei" by the Moldavian trio O-Zone. It was the source material for a well-known YouTube clip, the "Numa Numa Dance," which shows Gary Brolsma dancing to it in front of his webcam.
• This was produced by Just Blaze, whose previous credits include "Touch The Sky" by Kanye West, "Kingdom Come" by Jay-Z and "Breathe" by Fabolous.
• Rihanna was red-hot at the time, coming off her third album, Good Girl Gone Bad. "Live Your Life" was her third #1 hit in 2008, following "Take A Bow" and "Disturbia."
  
  T.I. wanted her on the track from the start. "I knew she was an international juggernaut," he told MTV. "It was a no-brainer. The only question was, would she be interested in doing it?"
  
  It took some back-and-forth with Rihanna's label, but she liked what she heard and agreed to feature on the track.
• T.I. did a lot to push rap further into the mainstream, which he boasts on here:
  
  Safe to say I paved the way
  For you cats to get paid today
  You'd still be wastin' days away
  Now had I never saved the day
  
  He was also part of the rise of Southern rap, particularly in Atlanta, where he's from, and on trend with rappers doing acting as a side hustle. In 2006 he starred in the movie ATL, and in 2007 he was in American Gangster.
• T.I. shows off his acting skills in the music video, which starts with him bloodied, walking under bridges. We flash back to learn that he was living the life of a mobster, and he had to take a beating to get out. At the end, he celebrates his new found freedom.
  
  It was directed by Anthony Mandler, who shot most of Rihanna's videos from this era.
• At the beginning of this song, T.I. gives a dedication to the American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This part is replaced in the video with a longer spoken-word section where T.I. ruminates on the unexpected turns that life can take. This made more sense in context with the video.
• On September 6, 2008, T.I. notched his first #1 Hot 100 hit when "Whatever You Like," also from the Paper Trail album, jumped from #71 all the way to the top, setting a record for longest vault to the top. On October 18, "Live Your Life" leapt from #80 to #1, overtaking "Whatever You Like," which went to #2, and breaking his own record. One week later, Britney Spears took the record away from T.I. when "Womanizer" leapt from #96 to #1.
• T.I. and Rihanna both did a lot of very successful collaborations. T.I. had guested on "Soldier" by Destiny's Child and "My Love" by Justin Timberlake; Rihanna had been on "If I Never See Your Face Again" with Maroon 5 and later appeared on "Love the Way You Lie" with Eminem.
• "Live Your Life" made a milestone in digital sales as downloads were rivaling CDs as the format of choice. The song sold 334,000 digital downloads its first week, breaking the record held by Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body." Four months later that record was broken by Enimem's comeback single "Crack a Bottle," which sold 418,000 digital copies in its opening week. Downloads became the most popular music format in 2011, but fell out of favor a few years later with the rise of streaming services.
• T.I. and Rihanna introduced this song at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards. A year later, it won the award for Best Male Video.
• When this song hit #1 in the US, Rihanna became the first woman to land five chart-toppers in the 21st century, and all of them hit the top before she turned 21. Her previous four were "SOS," "Umbrella," "Take A Bow" and "Disturbia."
• "Live Your Life" spent a total of six weeks at #1 in the US, but in three different runs. First it was knocked off by "Womanizer," then by "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)."
  
  The only other songs to have three separate turns at the top had been "Le Freak" by Chic in late 1978 and early 1979, plus two other 2008 chart-toppers, Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love" and T.I's other #1, "Whatever You Like."