The album was released with a DVD, which contained live videos for "Rocky Road to Dublin" and "Boys on the Docks", a music video for "Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight", and a trailer for their then upcoming untitled full-length DVD, which became On the Road With the Dropkick Murphys and was released the following year in March 2004.

Bass guitarist Ken Casey was familiar with the Mermaid Avenue albums by Billy Bragg and Wilco that had also used lyrics written by Woody Guthrie, and had enjoyed those works.

[1] In 2005, the band released a two-song CD single for the family of Andrew K. Farrar, Jr., a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps who was killed on January 28, 2005 in Al Anbar, Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Farrar, who was a big fan of the Murphys, made a request to his family that if he did not survive his tour of duty, he wanted their version of "The Fields of Athenry" to be played at his funeral.

The song "Buried Alive" deals with the Quecreek Mine Rescue which occurred in July 2002, describing the plight nine Pennsylvania coal miners faced while trapped underground for four days.