Dombal described the album as being "closer to earth than [White's] fantastic White Stripes yet further away than the sometimes-pedestrian Raconteurs or Dead Weather". "The Sunday Times" remarked that "if [White's] lyrics seem oppressively focused on one subject, his music heads happily all over the place, echoing all the previous aspects of his career and wandering into new areas." In an interview for "The New York Times", White said that "Blunderbuss"'s central theme is death, a topic he felt "was overwhelming throughout the lyric writing". The vulture resting on White's shoulder on the cover of the album is a representation of this theme. The album's lyrics explore loss, "collapsing relationships", and "breakup emotions of hurt and love", often depicting "weak-willed" men and focusing on "dishonesty, jealousy, [and] immorality". Its songs sometimes depict White "swearing himself off women". Jerry Shiver of "USA Today" called "Blunderbuss" "Jack White's divorce album", and Alexis Petridis of "The Guardian" said that the album occasionally characterizes relationships using lyrics "that are completely hysterical in every sense of the phrase". The opening track "Missing Pieces" depicts the loss of body parts to characterize what "NME"'s Barry Nicolson described as "the give-and-take of relationships": "When they tell you they just can’t live without you/ They ain’t lying, they’ll take pieces of you/ And they’ll stand above you/ And walk away". The narrator of the song "Love Interruption" expresses desires to be subjected to various violent actions by "love". Dombal ultimately viewed the song not as "some masochistic fantasy" but as "a form of self discipline", citing the line "I won't let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore". According to White, the narrator in the closing track "Take Me with You When You Go" initially "sound[s] misogynistic", but "is on his knees begging to be taken with the girl at the end". "Lyrical hooks" and "high school imagery" appear in the song "Sixteen Saltines", which depicts the conspicuousness of a former lover bringing an "emasculated, exasperated" narrator to a state of fragility. The titular track "Blunderbuss" utilizes internal rhymes and "images of decadence" as it describes an adulterous episode between the narrator and a married woman.