Trivia
- “Love The Way You Lie” was released as the album’s second single on the same day as the album itself, following “Not Afraid.”
- The song reached No. 1 on over thirty music charts worldwide, becoming Eminem’s most successful song to date, selling over 13 million copies in the US alone and earning a total of eight music awards.
- Eminem and performed the song live for the first time on June 14, 2010, prior to its official release, at Activision’s E3 event held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
- The song’s video director, , also directed the videos for “Without Me,” and “We Made You.”
- “Love The Way You Lie (Part II)” was released by featuring Eminem on November 12, 2010, from her album Loud.
Words from Eminem and Skylar Grey
““Love The Way You Lie” was the last song I actually recorded for Recovery. It kind of came at the 11th hour, and it was one of those things where when I heard the track, it felt like the mind frame that someone’s in when they’re actually in that relationship — how you don’t realize how crazy it looks to other people because it’s the norm to you. So you’re kinda like, “This is normal behaviour,’” because you’re in it, so you can’t see how crazy that kind of relationship actually is.
I always thought Rihanna was super talented. She’s got a really distinctive voice — as soon as you hear a record you know it’s her — and I think she’s a great singer. I really respect her and what she’s done throughout her career, so I kind of wrote the record with her in mind.
I was surprised at the immediate response that the record got. I’m not shocked in the sense of people being able to relate to it, whether you’ve been in a relationship that’s been that abusive or that crazy, anyone who’s been in a relationship has been through that on somewhat of a level, whether it would be on a small scale, all the way to what the record is exactly saying, somewhere in between, or whatever.
“[Around the time I wrote it], I was completely broke. I had lost pretty much all my relationships in the music industry. I had nobody left in my corner other than my publisher. So I reached out to her and I hadn’t spoken to her in years. I said, “Hey, I really need to figure out how to make a living in music because it’s the only thing I know how to do.” So she introduced me to this guy, Alex da Kid, over email.
So I went to the internet café in town and he would send me beats and I would send him back little rough ideas I recorded into my laptop, and “Love The Way You Lie” was one of those. He said he was going to send it to Eminem. I was like, “I don’t know how that’s happening, but go for it.”
I could not believe it when he was like, “He wants to cut it.” Pretty much about a month after I wrote it, it was a number one song. It happened so fast, it’s crazy. […] I always thought that it was so crazy because I never met Alex da Kid in person — he was in New York, I was in a cabin in the woods in Oregon, Marshall was in Detroit, Rihanna was in Dublin — and then this song was this huge number one and none of us had been in the room together.