"He turned to me after it was over, and he said, 'Is there anything I should know?' And I said no—it was just in case." The album features two songs co-written with former Wailin' Jennys member Annabelle Chvostek. Cockburn said: "I haven’t done very much co-writing with people over the years. Annabelle called me up one day and asked if I’d like to try writing a song with her. I hadn’t written anything for a while and I thought, 'That might be good.' ... I knew she was good. And I thought maybe this was the catalyst to get my own creative juices flowing again. We wrote 'Driving Away' and then got together again and wrote 'Boundless'. We wrote them as duets because we were writing them as equals, so we decided that we would record them on that level and perform them on that level." On another song, "Call Me Rose," he writes from the point of view of Richard Nixon, reincarnated as a single mother living in the projects. "I woke up one morning with this song in my head," Cockburn said, "and the opening line of the song is, 'My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl'." He said he had been angered by an earlier campaign by a member of the Bush administration to bring back the image of Richard Nixon. "There were all these pronouncements being made by various pundits in the press that he was the 'greatest President ever' and that he was misunderstood and all this baloney. And the interesting thing was nobody bought it. They kept doing this for a couple months and then all of a sudden it just disappeared; which suggested to me that somebody had paid to get this campaign going and once it hadn’t born fruit just cut it off. I was pleased to see that the American public was not taken in. Other than the fact that he made a very important gesture in terms of establishing communications with China—there’s no taking that away from him—he was a crook and a scumbag and no one should think otherwise. The fact that he was also an intelligent man doesn’t really mitigate the crookedness, or the carrying on of the war. The idea that you could bring him back as the 'greatest president ever' was absurd. So I suppose somewhere in there I might have been thinking, 'What would it take rehabilitate actual Richard Nixon?'