"A balance between the eternal and the ephemeral lives within these songs, along with one between the sweet and the sad. There is a lot of death on this album, but for the country/bluegrass genre, his approach is less morose than matter-of-fact, even sensitive and sweet about it. Maybe this is related to the creativity that can come within constraints, but some of the Jackson-written songs (he wrote eight of the 14) seem much stronger than the song's he written on the more commercial-leaning of his recent albums".