Multiple songs on the album feature intros consisting of a woman speaking about recent things she has been through. The samples are from an
audio diary found in a garbage bag of a girl known only as "Helena Marie".
Tim McIlrath has said of the tapes "None of us expected the messages in Helena Marie's audio diary to parallel The Killing Tree message so closely. And when it did, we knew it was just meant to be. It still gives me chills sometimes." In August 2018, Reu stated in the liner notes for vinyl reissue of the album, "Tim's roommate at the time, the brilliance and enigmatic Davy Rothbart, who was starting up Found Magazine, had given us a
tape of recorded diary-style therapeutic confessions that he had found during his scavenging for abandoned personal artifacts. The voice on the tape identified herself as Helena Murray, and she was at turns vulnerable, self-hating, naïve, regretful, optimistic, emotionally raw, and crushingly honest about her life, relationships, and the inner world. We connected with her voice immediately - she was a kindred spirit - and it felt like it was the spoken word companion to everything we were trying to channel into the songs we had written for the record both thematically and musically, so we wove a few excerpts from the tape throughout the record and name the project after an old radio soap opera, which was similar in name and the protagonist's brave honesty in searching for love and self in the face of the crushing disappointment life has to offer." ==Limited edition==