The songs find Young reminiscing about his youth, reflecting on the passing of time, and considering his own mortality in light of his father's illness and his own health scare. The album was written and recorded after diagnosis but before undergoing minimally invasive surgery for an
aneurysm in the spring of 2005. Young recorded the album's songs on a guitar owned by
Hank Williams. In a January 2006 interview for
Rolling Stone, Young explained his song writing process: "Falling Off the Face of the Earth," was inspired by a voicemail left for Young wishing him well as he went into surgery. "Most things just came pouring out, but that song's unique because a lot of it came from a voice-mail message. A friend of mine called, knowing I was going through this, and left me a voice mail that was, 'Thinking about you; just want to tell you that you mean a lot to me,' that kind of stuff. So I wrote it all down and made up this kind of bass-ackwards melody. With songwriting, the key thing is not to have any preconceptions, to be wide open and never worry about whether it's cool or not. Use whatever you can, and worry about cool after you finish the record." Young elaborates to
NPR's
Terry Gross: "Far From Home" finds Young remembering his father buying him his first musical instrument, an
Arthur Godfrey ukulele, and learning to perform songs from his family members: "Here for You" was written for his daughter, Amber, as she finished college and Young transitioned to life as an empty nester: "She's 21 and she's moving on, you know, she's in college, she's graduating, and I'm really proud of her and how well she is doing. She's an artist, and you know, of course, I miss her all the time but I really don't want to intrude so I was just trying to communicate to her that she has a place to go, but it wasn't a place she had to go, you know. She--if she needed me, I was there, that myself and her mother would be there for her if she ever needed us and that she was free to go and free to stay, and that we were behind her all the way, you know. So it is just that kind of a song, a kind of letting go without letting go." "When God Made Me" was written on piano: "First of all I didn't know what I was doing. There was a little room with a piano in it. And the piano is locked in the room. It'll never leave the room unless they destroy the room. It can't leave because the room was built around it. And the room is in a church. The studio is in a church. So the ceiling of this studio has got a few little vents in it. And if you stand on top of a ladder with a flashlight and look up through the holes you can see the church windows. And this old huge roof and everything, and it's closed off, because to get the right sound and everything they, they made a lower roof. But when you see that, it really gets you. And then I just started playing this hymn. And
Spooner Oldham is one of the most beautiful, beautiful gospel players on the organ; it's just great. I mean he's just alive with it. So I've learned a lot from him over the years, just listening to him. So all the passing chords and the blending of things together. But all hymns seem to have these little passages on the piano between them that sets up the next verse, kind of gets everybody in the key and kicks it around and gets ready to go. So I found myself just playing this and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing." ==Recording==