Coe and longtime producer Billy Sherrill enjoyed their biggest commercial success together in the 1980s with Top 5 singles “The Ride” and “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile," but by the end of the decade a new generation of country singers were marginalizing many of the old guard as far as radio play went, with AllMusic writer Thom Jurek observing about this Coe release, “Interestingly, this record sounds so outside the new traditionalist mold dominating Nash Vegas at the time that it was quickly lost to oblivion - despite the fact that it's a true traditional country record in the most strident use of the term.”[1] Like many of his previous albums, A Matter of Life…and Death is a concept album, with side one composed of “Meditations” and side two containing “Dedications.” As recounted by Jurek, the album Coe and Sherrill recorded is one of the singer’s most personal: The inspiration behind its making was the passing of Coe's father, Donald Mahan Coe, the return home (on the day of his father's funeral) of his 16-year-old daughter from living with her mother for the majority of her life, and the birth of his and Jody Lynn's two children, Tyler and Tanya Montana.

[1]The album opens with “The Ten Commandments of Love,” 1950s doo-wop-style ballad that uses guest Johnny Cash’s voice to full omniscient effect.

It opened up a lot of doors for me.”[2] The sentimental “Tanya Montana,” which was co-written with Sherrill and would be released as a single, peaking at #62 on the country singles chart, expresses the love and fears of a father for his young daughter and contains a spoken recitation by Coe, while “Actions Speak Louder than Words” on the Meditations side offers fatherly advice to a son, presumably Tyler Mahan Coe, who would later play in Coe’s touring band and host country music podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones.

Like the Dedications side, Coe closes the album with a rocker in the form of the title track, which addresses the emotional tailspin of losing a father and gaining a child at the same time.

AllMusic: This set yielded some of the strongest Coe songs of the 1980s (and that's saying something): ‘Jody Like a Melody,’ ‘If Only Your Eyes Could Lie,’ and ‘The Ten Commandments of Love.’ And ‘Southern Star,’ with its searing lyric and screaming guitar solos, is among his most under-recognized, poetic tomes worthy of being recorded by .38 Special or Lynyrd Skynyrd.