The timing was just calling for me to not avoid all the shit that was going on out there. When I started working on the record, I tried to avoid it. Nas discussed the album's personal subject matter in an interview for Billboard: When writing the album, Nas also reflected on aging and maturation, fatherhood, and his 20-year experience in hip hop music. For Life Is Good 's album cover, a photo was taken of Nas in a polished white suit, sitting in a night club's VIP lounge, appearing forlorn, and holding over his knee Kelis' actual green wedding dress, which he said was the only item she left him. Although he did not find his album 'quite so much about the marriage or the divorce', Nas likened Life Is Good to Marvin Gaye's 1978 album Here, My Dear, which was written by Gaye in response to his own deteriorating marriage and released as a financial settlement. Nas also wanted to write more original subject matter rather than another album 'about how you came up in the hood and how you had to make it out of the hood'. His songwriting on the album was also influenced by adjusting back to life as a single man. He soon became distracted by tax problems and an expensive, highly publicized divorce from his wife Kelis months before their son's birth, events that influenced his direction for Life Is Good. In 2010, Nas released his studio album Distant Relatives, a collaboration with Damian Marley that reinvigorated the rapper creatively. Nas' divorce from singer Kelis (photographed in 2010) inspired much of the album. In 2020, the Recording Industry Association of America awarded Life Is Good a Gold certification.

Three singles were released in its promotion – ' Nasty', ' The Don', and ' Daughters' – along with five music videos, while Nas toured in further support of the album from June to December 2012. It also reached the top 10 of record charts in Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Life Is Good received widespread critical acclaim and debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, reaching 354,000 copies sold by 2013. Life Is Good was written after his divorce from singer Kelis, whose original green wedding dress was featured in the cover photo, and Nas has compared the album to Marvin Gaye's 1978 divorce-inspired album Here, My Dear.

Nas wanted to draw on 1980s hip hop influences in order to complement the nostalgic tone of his lyrics, which he used to vent personal feelings and address moments in his life and rapping career, lending it themes of nostalgia and adulthood. and Salaam Remi incorporated orchestral elements and musical references to both contemporary and golden age hip hop, including boom bap beats and old school samples. Blige, Miguel, and, posthumously, Amy Winehouse, among others. The album was recorded at various studios in New York and California, with guest appearances from rappers Large Professor and Rick Ross, and singers Mary J. Life Is Good is the eleventh studio album by American rapper Nas, released on July 13, 2012, by Def Jam Recordings.

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